The state of artificial intelligence for photographers is an interesting one. In this article, you will learn what is and isn’t possible with artificial intelligence (AI).
As we approach 2022 I thought it would be interesting to share my take on what I see in the photography industry. Before we dive in it is important to answer the question, “What is artificial intelligence, or AI?”
What is artificial intelligence, or AI?
AI is a really exciting technology that you’re finding all over the place like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and much more. For example, Facebook uses AI all over the place, but most notable is facial recognition. Facebook recently announced at the time that I’m writing this (November 2021) they are removing facial recognition from its main platform where it’s going to detect your face in your friends or family’s photos and so on. But it is still using facial recognition in other aspects of the platform.
iPhones use AI as well from facial recognition to unlock phones or Siri recognizing how you use your devices.
So AI can do a lot of really cool things and there are multiple types of AI. I’m not going to get into all the science and technology behind it in too much detail, but there’s a lot of cool things that could be used. There’s a lot of cool things that artificial intelligence can do to replace human tasks.
There are also things that can be done as complementing and supplementing tasks.
Artificial Intelligence for Photographers
So I want to talk about a few of the things. Where AI can fit nicely into your workflows and into your photography businesses.
Cameras
Your cameras actually, have AI built into them. If you have a new mirrorless camera from Sony, Canon, Nikon, and If you have eye detection, or pet detection, or face detection, then your camera has AI built-in. Of course, this AI is built into the operating system and into the processors of those cameras. Meaning those cameras don’t have to call home. They don’t need an internet connection to utilize those features is built into the cameras. And this is a beautiful thing because it means your camera’s still running super fast.
It’s also a really good example of AI complementing or supplementing human tasks, helping you focus better (literally) on the most important aspect of the image.
But it does not. Inhibit. It does not infringe on anything. It just adds value. To what you’re already doing already.
Photo Editing
The next thing I would like to talk about is photo editing. This is where AI gets really interesting. Because the artificial intelligence here, a lot of it does actually have to call home (talk to the servers somewhere). It needs to send data to the servers so the AI can analyze and send it back either instantaneous, depending on what it is, or it might take a few minutes depending on what it is.
This might mean that your software runs a little slower which is not in everybody’s favor of course. You’ve got things like Apple Photos, which have AI built into it, but it does not call home. It literally has its machine learning stuff built into the operating system and chips in your computer – as do your iPhones. A lot of the Google stuff is built-in, but also has to call home.
To reiterate, artificial intelligence calling home means it has to send data to a server. It will actually send data to some sort of server, analyze that data, and send it right back. You never know what’s happening.
Google Photos does this when you upload photos to it. It’s going to send the data to its AI servers to be analyzed and sent back.
Adobe is doing a lot in the AI space too and with Photoshop and Lightroom Classic being probably the most widely used software for photographers, Adobe has to take its AI capabilities to the highest levels. So Adobe has an AI platform they built called Adobe Sensei.
Photoshop started utilizing it for different filters and features and now it’s slowly making its way over to Lightroom Classic as well. So now Lightroom Classic can detect a subject and you can do quick masking on a subject or a sky or anything like that. Using AI, which is great, right?
Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop can do full-sky replacements and a pile of other neural filters that are all AI-based, and are really cool. Of course, as I said, it does mean the software will run slower because it is calling home to the Adobe Sensei servers and providing the information back and forth to adjust as needed.
Lightroom Classic
If you noticed Lightroom Classic got slower when they introduced the new masking features, now you might understand why.
Adobe Sensei is actually powering a lot of different AI tools beyond just Photoshop and Lightroom.
It can do data analysis things for marketers, audio modification, video effects and so much more.
Lightroom
But let’s move on to Lightroom, which used to be called Lightroom CC. The one where Lightroom is sort of portable. You can throw it on the laptop and you can throw it on a phone or a tablet and you can access all of your cloud-based photos from wherever to edit, browse and cull. This also has AI capabilities beyond the auto-processing button.
You can do quick culling inside of the Lightroom software. You can ask it to show you the best photos in a collection. It will then analyze the entire collection and tell you, with ratings what it feels are the best overall.
Luminar
Then you have software like Skylum Luminar that uses AI in many different aspects:
- Cropping
- Sky replacement
- Portrait retouching
- Background removals
- Dirt removal
- Dust removal
- Spot removal
- Line removal
Each of these uses Skylum’s impressive AI capabilities to perform its actions.
You don’t have to manually go to every spot or line and do any cloning or content-aware removing as it’s doing it for you.
Skylum’s AI will require the software to call home so you might see a little bit of a performance hit.
This is a trend that we’re going to see until companies take a page out of Apple’s machine learning playbook.
on1
Then you have on1 who makes on PhotoRAW, but then they also have nonoise AI, portrait AI, and they’re coming out with a wide range of software that also has AI capabilities for removing backgrounds, finding the sky, removing noise, and all of these different things as well.
Topaz Labs
I can’t leave out Topaz Labs who has been doing this for many years. I think they have been doing this for way longer than even Skylum and potentially even Adobe. They have photo enlargement using AI. They have noise reduction using AI sharpening using AI. There’s a wide range of tools that Topaz makes even in the video space for AI.
Meta
Speaking of video, JPEGmini, which is an image compression software that uses AI capabilities that analyze every photo that it touches. It automatically compresses each photo individually to its best possible compression. I don’t know for sure, but I believe it might use in-computer processing rather than calling home because it goes so darn fast.
Also, if you’re using JPEGmini Pro then as of November, 2021, it now will also do the same thing for videos, which is a beautiful thing.
I mentioned that in Lightroom, you can do some basic culling, but if you need better calling that’s in the AI space there are two companies doing incredible work in that field. Actually, there are a half dozen or so on the marketing, but very I’m impressed with two.
One is called AfterShoot and the other, Optyx.
Note: Yes, I named AfterShoot’s mascots Cully and Eddy, and yes, I work for their competitor Imagen. Even if I did not work for Imagen, I would not be recommending AfterShoot to anyone for so many reasons.
As I said, there are a lot more, but those are the two leaders of the pack in my personal opinion. They’re both doing great stuff in the AI calling space.
Both are recognizing faces, recognizing if eyes are open or closed recognizing good exposure, and things like that. And they will rate it either to their specifications for ratings, or you can make your own.
Now let’s say you need to do some keywording and you don’t want to do that manually. Maybe you are a stock photographer, or you just like to have all your photos keyword or you’re thinking about the future where Google is looking at keywords in the metadata for your photos. Their software, like Excire Foto. It will analyze your photos, determine keywords using AI and actually keyword your photo in Lightroom for you.
Or if you do not use Lightroom, you can use the standalone software and it will put the keywords in a sidecar file.
Excire has a Lightroom plus as well as a standalone app.
Outsourced Editing
I have talked about photo editing software, but now I want to talk about outsourced editing. This is particularly useful when you don’t care about the AI stuff in your photo editing software but you do want to outsource your photo editing.
Let’s say you’re a wedding photographer doing a lot of weddings. And you’ve got two or three weddings a month. That could be 12,000 photos a month or 144,000 photos a year which require editing. That’s a lot of labor!
Your options are:
- Send it to a freelance editor which could be expensive
- Have an assistant edit, which could be expensive
- Work with an agency like ShootDotEdit, which would offer a monthly or annual plan
- Use AI software to edit your photos in bulk, in your own style.
Imagen is an AI software/service that can edit thousands of photos fast, in your own style, and send them back to your Lightroom Classic catalog.
With Imagen you start out by training profiles of your editing styles. Each profile requires 5,000 or more edited photos. Once trained, new sessions can be delivered within 30 minutes with amazing results.
Eventually, Imagen will work with other software, but at the time of writing this, only Lightroom Classic is supported. (November 2021)
That’s time-saving, complementary, and supplementary AI in the photography space.
Website
We, as photographers are not always writers, and we’re not always bloggers. So it’s nice to find complementary and supplementary software and tools to help us in our writing process for years. I’ve been using Grammarly. Especially as someone who is dyslexic and writes and creates content in general for living.
I rely on Grammarly. I don’t always use it as my first go-to word processing software. I typically use Google Docs for that. But I will use Grammarly’s Chrome extension, Safari extension, or actually copy-paste into the Grammarly software. Which, by the way, I can also access on my phone. It uses its AI to analyze spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, for better-rephrased sentences for plagiarism.
Let’s say you need some guidance in the actual writing process. There’s additional software that I recommend checking out called either ContentBot, which is actually the one I use, or Jarvis, which is probably the best in the industry as far as AI text content writing.
These tools can do things like write full blog articles, landing page text, marketing copy, SEO metadata and so much more. These services can help you with writing for your photography business.
Finally, I can’t go without mentioning one of my favorite tools, called Descript. It’s an audio and video editor that utilizes text for editing. Because it’s designed for podcasting, it means you can also talk to it, and its near-perfect AI-based transcription can write your blog posts for you. In fact, the blog post you just read was originally written by me recording what I had to say inside of Descript.
So there you go – this is a state of artificial intelligence for photographers.
My biggest concern right now is actually how slow photo-editing gets with AI features are functions of the apps.
That’s one of the reasons why I think Imagen’s software is so cool, that it doesn’t rely on built-in software. You actually sending it off to the AI to get edited and then send it back.
Of course, it cannot do everything that you could do inside of Photoshop, for example. But it can always get there and that’s the beautiful thing.
Are you using any specific artificial intelligence currently in your photo editing or business?
If so, what are you using, why do you like it and what would you like to see improved?
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