If you haven’t heard about how AI is rapidly changing the world of imagery and photography, among so many other things, then you’ve got a very large rock to crawl out from under! Today we are going to check out a potentially very useful app for photographers, real estate photographers to be exact. Virtual Staging AI is an app that, as its name suggests, uses AI to stage an empty room in a home.
The concept is straightforward: What used to take hours in Photoshop can now be accomplished in less than 30 seconds: once you upload an image, just tell the AI what type of room it is (living room, bedroom, kitchen, office, etc.) and the AI will completely furnish the room for you.
So, how does it work? If you’re a real estate photographer who regularly works with empty rooms, you need to read this review, and try out VIrtual Staging AI for yourself!
The app’s web-based interface is free to try, with a watermark over your images, and, considering how simple the whole process is, you will be able to quickly decide whether or not Virtual Staging AI is right for you as a photographer!
What Is Virtual Staging?
Virtual staging is very useful for real estate in any market area where there are a lot of completely empty rooms to sell. Simply put, being able to “stage” a home with furnishing is a huge help to potential buyers who want to envision how a room will actually look. Even though the house doesn’t come with the furniture, of course, it’s a powerful tool. An empty room isn’t very attractive, and a sense of scale is extremely difficult to grasp when imagining your own “stuff” in that room.
Before, accomplishing virtual staging was extremely costly because each piece of furniture had to be manually photoshopped into a room. This is obviously a tedious process and just isn’t a viable business model for any real estate photographer, or real estate agent, who may have dozens of photos to attach to multiple listings.
How Real Estate Photographers Can Use AI For Virtual Staging
A lot of homes and properties may already have furniture in them, but in certain markets or geographical areas, a real estate photographer might be photographing a lot of empty houses, too! This can depend on the area, the target market, and even the economic times.
Simply put, you might not require virtual staging for every single job, but it’s still a powerful tool to have on your radar, in case you need it. One thing we are very curious about is, how this AI would handle large office spaces in commercial real estate since that market seems to be, shall we say, getting “volatile” in 2023.
We will keep our eyes open for future developments and new features from the folks at Harvard Innovation Labs!
Pros & Cons Of Virtual Staging AI
The features really do speak for themselves, in terms of the advantages of using Virtual Staging as a real estate photographer. You get nearly instant results, (clocked at under 30 sec per image) and each image can have unlimited revisions. With any of their monthly subscription plans, you get access to all of their room types, and the ability to add your own company logo/watermark over the high-res image results.
It does a great job of matching the warmth/coolness of light in a space, and a decent job of matching the softness and direction of the light, too!
One thing we should mention is that there are no options to drag and drop individual pieces of furniture around the room, of course. This is a one-click solution that fills your whole room using artificial intelligence.
For us as real estate photographers, that sounds fine! We’ll probably save time that way. For those with OCD, this may be seen as a con. But, again, the simplified process will absolutely save photographers time.
If the results don’t match your taste, a totally different set of furniture is just a few seconds away. In our experience, we always found something we liked on the first or second try.
One thing that we think would be very useful, however, would be an overall scale/size slider to adjust. The furniture almost always looks proportional to the room it’s in, however, from time to time we do wish that we could make everything just a bit larger or smaller.
All in all, this is a beautiful concept that is executed with simplicity and power. If you’re a serious professional real estate photographer, then chances are you’ll encounter empty rooms, and this is one of the most affordable options we have seen to stage those empty rooms!
Virtual Staging AI App Pricing
For $15 per month, you can upload 50 images. (Again, remember, each image comes with unlimited revisions!) For any photographers who need to output many more photos, the Standard plan is $35/mo and goes up to 100 images per month and adds perpetual online image storage. The seriously high-volume pros will want the Enterprise plan, at $199/mo, which bumps up to 500 images per month, as well as API access and 24/7 personal customer support. You can check out their website for more info, of course.
Conclusion | Virtual Staging AI
The advantages of this app are truly obvious to any real estate photographer, especially those who work directly with real estate agents to accomplish the ultimate goal of selling a home quickly and for the best price. What used to be either impossible or cost a fortune just a decade ago is now, well, almost instant, and costs literally pennies per image!
All in all, we are definitely keeping our “eye” on Virtual Staging AI for any real estate photography needs that come our way.
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