Tag Archives: photoshop

When strangers disappear from all of our photos

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This has been possible with Photoshop and similar tools for years but Magic Eraser from Google makes it even easier: we can get rid of strangers in our photos. Should we?

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels.com

My most Andy Rooney opinion, at least since the latest flare-up of the sleepover debate (I’m pro), is that we should not erase strangers from our family pictures. My original nuclear family’s albums, which my mother maintained in those classic 1980s scrapbooks with self-adhesive pages, annotating each image in her distinctive handwriting, are absolutely, positively chock-full of randos. When I was in elementary school, I loved to look at these pictures, hauling out two albums at a time and paging through them at our kitchen table. It was a time when I was becoming acutely aware of the difference between our family and others—not in a bad way, but in an interested one. We lived in a small town, and our family vacations gave us information about how things were elsewhere. I wasn’t going to pass up analyzing those clues.

The people we are around are also parts of our lives, even if we do not know them. To take pictures in public often means that others are present. We may not interact with them but we do not live in a world where we have our own bubbles and no one else is around.

There may be occasional times where removing strangers makes sense. Perhaps we want to focus on particular people or a particular scene. But, doing this at a larger scale always puts us at the center and makes it appear as other people do not exist.

Is this a continuation of the emphasis on the individual self? Social media, which is linked to the images we take, see, and use today, also encourages emphasizing ourselves. In images and a world where there is no one portrayed around us, we are at the center.

A future world where our pictures only feature us makes me think of Black Mirror or an extended global pandemic where streets and public places are empty. It would be a loss of our collective memories and the ways that we rely on nameless others every day.

Staging a home with photoshopped furniture and features

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Here is a solution for empty homes on the market for a long time: photoshopped home furnishings.

With virtual staging, Spinelli said, she visits an empty house or one that’s in need of updating, draws on her designer talents to capture the most important rooms photographically, then stages them digitally…

One reality of selling in the digital age is that a large percentage of buyers sit at computers, sifting through hundreds of listings, to cut physical visits to a reasonable number…

“Not staging an empty house makes it look cold and less inviting, but not everyone in today’s market can afford the cost of doing so, especially when you add in the monthly expense of furniture rental,” said Schumacher, who has been using Spinelli’s virtual efforts for one of her listings, a $500,000 house owned by a couple who moved to North Carolina and left it empty.

“It is the electronic version of curb appeal,” Schumacher said, adding that activity picked up in the first three weeks of the virtual staging.

The cost is $198 an image, which comes with an unlimited licensing fee for use in brochures. On the Multiple Listing Service, the house must be identified as digitally staged.

Helping potential buyers see the home as it might be used is helpful. As one can see on numerous HGTV shows, some buyers have a really hard time seeing past the small cosmetic issues and what is possible in rooms. The furniture can help provide perspective on room size and also make a more bland room look sharper.

However, I was amused to see this story because I just saw an example of this the other day. The problem: the photoshopping was not done well and it made the pictures comical. Some issues like the lighting on the furniture versus the lighting in the room are difficult to handle (the furniture does seem to float above the floor a bit). On the other hand, if you are going to show two pictures of the living room, don’t reverse the furniture so it always faces the camera even as the angle changes. And then you wonder, are the kitchen appliances photoshopped (I don’t think so)? Can they photoshop bathrooms to show newer fixtures (which this house might need)?

Given the difficulties sometimes present in photographing homes for sale, I’ll be curious to see if this photoshop trend catches on.