In short
- Shoot from about chest height with the camera level, so vertical lines stay vertical and furniture can be placed at a believable scale.
- Frame from a corner or doorway to show two walls and a generous area of floor; staging needs floor to put furniture on.
- Avoid extreme wide-angle lenses, which stretch the edges of the frame and make added furniture look distorted.
- Turn every light on and balance the exposure against the windows; exposure adjustments are not digital alteration under AB 723.
- For a room you want staged as a set, shoot two or three positions and stage them together on one seed.
Virtual staging composes furniture into the room it is given. It reads the floor, the walls, the light and the perspective from the photograph and builds on them. A crooked horizon, a floor cut off at the bottom of the frame or a room lit only by one window all carry straight through into the staged result, and no choice of style fixes them afterwards.
Camera height and level
Shoot from roughly chest height, somewhere around 1.2 to 1.5 metres, with the camera level. Tilting the camera up or down makes vertical lines — door frames, window edges, corners — lean towards each other. Staging has to match that lean on every piece it adds, and a render built on converging verticals tends to look subtly wrong even when a viewer cannot say why.
Straightening a frame afterwards is fine; it is one of the adjustments AB 723 expressly excludes. But it crops the image, so it is better to get it level in camera.
Framing: show the floor
Stand in a corner or a doorway and frame two walls. That gives the render a clear sense of the room's depth and, more importantly, a large, unbroken area of floor. Furniture has to stand on something; a frame that is mostly wall and ceiling leaves nowhere to put a sofa.
- Keep the whole floor plane in view down to the skirting boards on at least two sides.
- Leave the room's main feature — a fireplace, a window wall, a kitchen island — in frame, since the staging will be arranged around it.
- Choose a moderate wide angle rather than the widest lens you have. Extreme wide angles stretch the corners of the frame, and furniture placed there inherits the stretch.
Light
Turn every light in the room on, open the blinds, and expose so that the room is bright without the windows blowing out to white. Bracketed or HDR exposures are fine: exposure and white balance are adjustments, not alterations, as long as they do not change how the property is represented.
Consistent light matters more than bright light. The render matches the direction and colour of the light it finds, so a room lit by warm bulbs on one side and cool daylight on the other produces staging that looks lit from two different rooms.
Empty it properly
If the room is not empty, the render has to work around what is there. Remove what you can before you shoot. Anything left — a stray box, a ladder, a cable across the floor — either survives into the staged image or has to be erased first, which is a second alteration to disclose.
Rooms you want staged as a set
Buyers look at several photos of the living room, not one. If you want those photos to read as one room, shoot two or three positions and stage them together. Vesta's multi-angle staging holds the room type, style and generation seed constant across the set, which keeps the palette and the character of the furniture consistent. It does not make individual pieces line up between viewpoints; why that is is worth understanding before you promise a client a matching set.
Before you upload
- Name the files by room, so originals can be matched to renders later. Vesta publishes the originals for the AB 723 link, but your own copies are your record.
- Keep the untouched originals somewhere safe and separate from edited versions.
- Tell the studio the correct room type. The render is steered by it, and a bedroom staged as an office is not a style choice anyone can fix afterwards.