Can I use my own dealership as the Showroom?

Yes. In Clearcoat, a Showroom can be a photo of your own dealership. Upload one photo of your empty showroom floor, approve it, and it becomes a Showroom your whole Team can pick in the Studio. Every car you generate there is cut from your lot photo and stood on your floor, with a contact shadow, a floor reflection and your room's light added. Nothing on the car is redrawn. Creating the Showroom costs no Credits; each finished photo costs one Credit, as usual.

Why use your own showroom as the backdrop?

Lot photos rarely match each other. The weather changes, other cars sit behind the one you are listing, and each salesperson frames the shot a little differently. Driving every car indoors to photograph it fixes that, but it takes floor space and time most stores cannot give to every unit.

With your own room as the Showroom, Clearcoat puts every car from your ordinary lot photos into the same recognisable space: your floor, your walls, your lights. The whole inventory looks like one store, whoever took the photos and wherever the car was parked, and buyers see your dealership rather than a backdrop any other dealer could also choose. Because the car's pixels come straight from your photo, the listing still shows the actual vehicle: its paint, badges, wheels, trim and wear.

How do I create a Showroom from my dealership?

It takes one photo and one approval.

1. Open Showrooms and choose New showroom. You can also start from the Studio: open the showroom picker, go to Your Team and choose New showroom.
2. Choose Upload and add one photo of the place. Clearcoat accepts JPEG, PNG, WebP or AVIF files under 20 MB.
3. Choose Create preview. For an upload, the preview is your photo itself. Nothing is generated or saved yet.
4. Name it and choose Approve and save. If the photo is not right, choose Discard and upload a better one.

Once saved, the Showroom appears under Your Team for everyone on the Team, Owners and Members alike, and anyone can select it in the Studio for any Vehicle. A private seller can do the same with a garage or a clean driveway: whatever place you photograph becomes the room.

Upload a photo you took yourself or have the right to use, as Clearcoat's Terms require for every upload.

Should I choose Upload or Describe?

Choose Upload to show your own dealership. Upload uses your actual room, exactly as you photographed it.

Describe creates a new room from a written description of up to 1,000 characters. Clearcoat generates it as an empty, wide space with no vehicles, people, logos or legible promotional text, so describing "our showroom with grey tile floors and a glass front" gives you a room that resembles yours, not your building. Describe is useful when you want a look you do not have, such as a darker studio or a bright outdoor setting, and you can regenerate a described room before approving it.

What should the photo of my showroom look like?

Clearcoat uses your photo as the room as it is, crops it to the aspect ratio you pick for each Generation, and stands the car in the centre of the frame, low down, with its tyres about an eighth of the way up from the bottom edge. The advice below follows from that.

• Clear the middle of the floor. Clearcoat keeps the room as it is and does not remove anything from it. A parked car, desk or sign stand in the centre stays in the room, behind or around the new car. Shoot an empty bay, or move things out first.
• Shoot landscape and keep the room centred. Every finished photo is centre-cropped to 3:2, 4:3, 16:9 or 1:1. A landscape frame with the important parts of the room near the middle works for all four; a portrait photo loses most of the room.
• Leave plenty of open floor. The lower part of the frame is where the car stands, so it should be floor, not a wall, a counter or your feet.
• Shoot from about the height you shoot cars. Clearcoat does not change the car's perspective. A room photographed from roughly the same height, with the camera level, as your lot photos is more likely to read as one photograph.
• Turn the lights on. The shadow and reflection Clearcoat adds follow the room, and a glossy floor gets a reflection under the car.
• Include the turntable if you have one. When a round platform or turntable is clearly visible and fills a good part of the lower frame, Clearcoat may stand the car on it. Otherwise the car goes on the floor in the centre.
• A phone photo is enough. Finished photos are about 2K, for example 2016 pixels wide at 3:2, well within what a current phone captures.

Because the preview for an upload is simply your photo, the review step is the moment to check it against this list before you save.

What does Clearcoat change in my room and my car?

In the room, Clearcoat adds only what a car standing there would cause. It asks the image model to keep your walls, floor, platform and lights where they are, add a soft contact shadow under the tyres and body, add a reflection if the floor is glossy, and add no people or other vehicles. The room in the finished photo is that lit version of your photo, so treat wall lettering and small signs as part of the background rather than a place for your logo; they are not guaranteed to come through letter for letter.

The car is the original car from your lot photo. Clearcoat pastes its pixels back over the result with the room's light applied, and rejects any result where the model moved or redrew the car. The same guarantee holds in your own room as in any built-in Showroom.

What happens if I replace or delete my Showroom later?

Deleting a Team Showroom removes it from future use. Photos already delivered in it stay exactly as they are, because each Generation keeps the Showroom version it was made with. To refresh the look after a remodel, upload a new photo as a new Showroom and use it for new photos.