How to photograph a room for virtual staging: 5 steps

Staging works by reading the room you photographed. It can only put a sofa where the photograph shows floor, and it can only judge scale from what it can see. So almost everything that makes a staged image look wrong was decided before the upload — in where you stood and what the light was doing.

This guide is for anyone taking their own photographs on a phone, whether you are an agent without a photographer booked or a homeowner selling or letting privately. None of it needs special equipment.

Before you start

A recent phone is enough. Wipe the lens with a soft cloth first; a greasy thumbprint is the most common reason a photograph looks hazy. Use the main camera rather than the ultra-wide. The ultra-wide makes a room look bigger, but it curves straight lines near the edges and stretches anything close to the lens, and both make furniture harder to place convincingly. Shoot landscape, because listings are shown landscape. Turn off filters and portrait mode, and leave HDR on if your phone offers it: it helps keep a bright window and a dark corner in the same frame.

1. Stand in a corner, not a doorway

A shot from the doorway shows one wall and a lot of floor. A shot from a corner shows two walls meeting, which is what gives the room its depth and gives staging something to anchor furniture against. If the room only has one usable corner, use it, even if it feels tight.

Stand as far back into the corner as you can and face the opposite corner or the main window wall. Take one from each of two diagonal corners. One is usually clearly better, and having the second means you do not need to go back.

2. Keep the camera at chest height and level

Tilting up or down bends the verticals, and a room whose walls lean is a room where a bookcase cannot be placed convincingly. Chest height, phone held level, is the whole technique.

Most phones can show a grid and a level in the camera settings; switch both on. Line up a door frame or the edge of a window with a vertical grid line. If the door frame leans in the preview, the walls will lean in the staged image too. In a small room, go a little lower so the floor fills more of the frame.

3. Show the floor

The floor is where the furniture goes. A photograph cropped tight to the far wall leaves nowhere to put anything, and the result reads as furniture floating in a picture rather than standing in a room. Aim for roughly a third of the frame to be floor.

Plenty of visible floor also stops staging from overfilling the room. With space to work in, furniture can be placed at a sensible scale with room to walk around it, which is what makes a room look usable rather than crowded.

4. Choose even light over bright light

Hard sun through one window gives you a blown-out patch and a dark corner, and staging has to invent what is in both. An overcast morning is the easiest light there is. If you must shoot into the sun, turn the room lights on as well — it flattens the gap.

Open every blind and curtain fully and switch on every light, so the colour of the light is even. Avoid mixing a cold bulb in one corner with a warm one in another if you can; the photograph shows the difference more than your eye does. Do not use the flash. If a room has no daylight at all, shoot it with every light on so it is at least evenly lit.

5. Clear the room completely, or not at all

A single stacked chair or a bin bag in the corner is the thing the eye lands on in the finished image. Half-clearing a room is worse than not clearing it — if the seller cannot empty it, stage it as it is and use the mode that keeps their furniture.

Clearing means more than furniture. Take down torn curtains, remove loose cables, shut cupboard doors, put the toilet seat down and take bins, shoes and cleaning products out of the shot. Staging adds to a room; it cannot reliably tell which of your belongings are meant to be there.

Room by room

• Living rooms: shoot towards the fireplace or the main window wall, which is where furniture naturally faces.
• Bedrooms: make sure the wall the bed will go against is in the frame. Without it, the placement is a guess.
• Kitchens: shoot along the run of units rather than straight at them, and clear the worktops completely.
• Kitchen diners and open-plan rooms: show where the kitchen stops and the dining space starts, and set the room type rather than leaving it on Auto.
• Box rooms: the doorway may be the only place to stand. Go slightly lower, and say which room you want it to be.
• Bathrooms: shoot from a corner and check the mirror does not show you.

Common mistakes

• Shooting from the doorway because it is easier.
• Using the ultra-wide lens in every room.
• Tilting the phone to fit the ceiling in.
• Leaving one or two things in an otherwise empty room.
• Shooting straight into a bright window with the room lights off.

Common questions