How do I hide license plates in car photos?

In Clearcoat, leave Number plates set to Hide in the Studio before you generate. Hide is the default. Every license plate Clearcoat detects on the car comes back clean and blank, with no characters, in the same step that places the car in the Showroom. There is no separate editing pass and no extra charge: each finished photo is still one Credit. Choose Keep instead if you want the plate exactly as photographed.

Why hide the plate in Clearcoat instead of on the lot or in an editor?

The usual methods cost time on every car. Either someone unscrews or covers the plate before shooting, or someone opens each photo in an editor and blurs or pixelates the plate one photo at a time.

Clearcoat hides the plate as part of the work it already does. The Generation that puts each selected photo of the car in the Showroom also hides the plate in each one, so you can shoot the car as it sits on the lot, plates on, and the listing photos come back ready. A trade-in still wearing its previous owner's plate needs no extra step before its photos go up.

What does Hide do to the plate?

• It leaves a blank plate, not a blurred one. The plate keeps its shape, frame, position and the Showroom's light, but carries no letters, numbers or emblems. The photo still shows a car with a plate, only without characters. A blurred or pixelated plate still holds a scrambled version of its characters, and security research has shown that blurred and pixelated text can sometimes be recovered (Hill, Zhou, Saul and Shacham, 2016; McPherson, Shokri and Shmatikov, 2016). A blank plate has no characters left to recover.
• It checks its own work. Clearcoat checks each hidden plate for characters the first pass missed. If it finds any, it covers the plate in its own background color instead.
• It redraws only the plate. Nothing else on the car is redrawn. Paint, badges, wheels, trim and wear come straight from your photo, with the Showroom's light on them. With Hide on, the plate is the one part of the car Clearcoat redraws.
• Plates on other cars leave with the lot. Hide treats the plates on the car you photographed. Cars parked behind it are cut away with the background when the car moves into the Showroom, so their plates never reach the finished photo, and you don't need to crop or reshoot around them.

What should I check before listing the photos?

Hide acts on the plates Clearcoat detects, so look at every finished photo before it goes on a listing. The Studio viewer toggles between the Showroom photo and your original, which makes a plate left as photographed, or one with characters still showing, easy to spot. Take most care with very close shots of the front or rear, where the plate fills a large part of the frame: Clearcoat may leave that plate as photographed. Shoot that angle from a little further back, or leave the close-up out of the listing.

Number plates is one choice for the whole Generation, fixed when you generate. To get the other treatment, generate the photos again with the other setting. The photos stay saved on the Vehicle, so there is nothing to upload again, but each new photo spends a Credit.

When should I choose Keep?

Choose Keep when the plate is part of what you are showing. A personalized plate that is included in the sale is one example. Keep leaves the plate exactly as photographed. Like the rest of the car, it is not redrawn.