Landscape design tool

Whole yard is the default and the one most people need. One photograph, one of 18 styles, everything on the ground plane regenerated while the building stays put.

Exterior works on the house rather than the yard: siding, paint, roofline and trim seen in context with the planting around them. It is the tool for anyone deciding on colour before hiring painters.

Object removal takes something out of the frame — the shed, the stump, the rusting play set, the trampoline nobody uses. It is unglamorous and it is the tool people come back to, because seeing the yard without the eyesore is often the entire decision.

All three run inside the 3 free designs, at full resolution, with no watermark and no card.

Pool area places a pool and its surround into your real yard, which answers shape, decking and where the loungers sit.

Garden beds works only on planting: bed shapes and species by exposure, with the output labelled.

Lighting shows the yard after dark, which is the cheapest way to avoid trenching cable to the wrong places.

Curb appeal renders the front from the street, framed the way a passer-by or a buyer sees it.

Full makeover changes hardscape and planting together, which is the heaviest pass and the one to use last, once the individual decisions are settled.

Five tools, $59.99 a year or $7.99 a week. Stating the gate up front is deliberate: undisclosed paywalls are the second-biggest complaint cluster across this whole category.

Match the tool to the decision, not to the ambition. Running full makeover first is the common mistake — it changes everything at once, so when you dislike the result you cannot tell which change caused it.

Deciding whether to keep the shed: object removal. Deciding on paint: exterior. Deciding on planting only: garden beds. Deciding what the house says from the kerb: curb appeal.

Then run whole yard once you know the answers, so the finished frame reflects decisions you have already made rather than proposing new ones.

Each pass takes about 10 seconds, so a sequence of four is still under a minute of waiting. Try the sequence on your own photograph and the difference between one big render and four small ones is obvious immediately.

No tool in the set outputs a number. No square footage, no plant quantities, no cost, no material list. That is a choice — a figure derived from one photograph would carry an error bar wide enough to be dishonest.

None of them handles grading, drainage or soil, and none knows your setbacks or permit rules.

The lighting tool shows fittings but not circuits, transformer sizing or cable runs. The pool tool shows a pool but not whether it can legally sit there.

Every one of the eight depicts planting at mature size. The wider comparison of design software covers which tiers of tool produce dimensioned output instead, because none of these do.