AI-Based Editing That Learns Your Style? Fstoppers Reviews ImagenAI – Fstoppers

Are you excited about finally resuming your wedding and events photography, but the editing stageis giving you flashbacks to countless hours spent in front of your screen? This is where ImagenAI might come in handy! Take a look at this review.

I believe, it is safe to say that post-processing is one of the least appealing parts of wedding photography, especially if you are tasked with delivering numerous galleries during the peak of your wedding season and clients are eager to get their hands on the images as soon as possible. Although it might be a process we enjoy during a quieter season, the hours spent at the screen for every client quickly rack up, eating into our time we could have spent working on something else or relaxing.

The pandemic brought a very quiet, or rather nonexistent, wedding and events season upon us, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel as things are slowly starting to open up and restrictions have begun to loosen up. This meanssoon, you will be diving right back into photographing clients' weddings and events, bringing back all the highs and lows with it, including editing.

If you are looking for ways to reduce time spent editing while still maintaining a level of control and authority over your personal style that clients know you for,ImagenAI has brought out a product that may be of interest to you.

To put it simply, ImagenAI is an AI-assisted smart tool that works seamlessly with Lightroomto deliver you fast edits straight into your catalog, based on your own personal and unique editing style, which the algorithm learns from to improve on with every catalog that you edit thereafter. This algorithm learns your editing styleby reviewing several catalogs of your previously edited work, which helps it build your unique profile. The more edited work you send in, the more it is able to extract the information to deliver more accurate results.

ImagenAI can and has been used for wedding, events, newborn, food, real estate, and other types of photography. It is primarily aimed at professionals who regularly edit and deliver work to clients; however, it can also appeal to photographers who are starting out to help them build a faster workflow.

This tool has two primary features: editing with your own unique profile, which is built from your previous catalog edits or editing with the help of "Talents." Currently, ImagenAI features five Talentsto choose from with distinct styles of editing. These are actual working professionals whose editing styles or,to be more precise, profiles can be applied to your own catalog. From there on, you would adapt the final edits in Lightroom to suit your preferencesand also have the opportunity to begin building your own profile using Talents as a starting point.

This algorithm also works for studio companies to help maintain a consistent style across different editors.

When it comes to editing, ImagenAI supports adjusting white balance, tonal changes, such as exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, and more, presence (clarity, vibrance, saturation, texture, and dehaze), colors section, which includes hue, saturation, and luminance, as well as advanced options, such as straighten and crop.

The whole process for working with a personal profile when a user has at least 5,000 images that the software can learn editing from can be broken down into these steps:

Overall, ImagenAI claims to reduce 75% in editing time and spends less than one second per photo, increasing your productivity four times.

Similar to companies specializing in post-processing, edits are priced based on the number of images you want to edit. If you want to maintain and build upon your personal profile, as opposed to using Talents, an additional$7 monthly fee ensures your profile is maintained and kept up to date.

If the user chooses to cancel their subscription during a quiet season, their profile is kept on the system for a certain time, but the company doesn't guarantee it will be kept forever;the company claimsitminimized the monthly fixed base payment to an affordable fee, however, even in quiet seasons, photographers can still create profile(s) that work with non-wedding work, which they may book during wedding off-seasons.

Pricing using a user-unique profilehas three tiers:

For example, editing a 400-image wedding gallery would cost you $24 using the first tier. The monthly$7 fee is already included in the bill because it acts as a minimum fee to be paid.

Editing with Talents is priced as follows:

Currently, the company is offering 1,000 free edits for 30 dayswhen you sign up. And, as of its latest update, a "refer a friend" option is available, which rewards both users with 500 free edits.

Before I dive into first impressions of the actual product, I want to acknowledge that AI-assisted tools in the photography industry have been present for some time, whether that is assisted culling, individual edits with more complex features, such as seamless sky replacement, or others. When it comes to individuality, AI cannot replicate the full extent of creativity that humans possess, because our vision is as unique as weare;however, I believe that there is a place where AI assistance tools can come in to make our life easier.

With that in mind, the first steps of setting time aside to prepare catalogs with your previous edits are important to get this process started. I spent a couple of evenings going through older weddings that I had edited that I felt would represent my style and would positively contribute towards the creation of my unique ImagenAI profile.

The first thing to note is that you are contributing your past edited images tothe creation of one profile. If you are a multi-faceted photographer who shoots different genres, you will want to spend time creating separate profiles for each genre because how you edit your weddings will differ from how you edit your real estate photographs.

Even though the algorithm is intelligent enough to ignore images within your previous catalogs that don't contribute towards the creation of your profile, such as TIFF files that may have been edited in Photoshop or in another program and then returned back in Lightroom, there are limitations in its capabilities. For example, you cannot expect to receive both color and monochrome edits.

To do that,it would mean that the AI would need to make the decision on which images to keep in color and which ones to edit in monochrome, which is a decision some of us struggle with at times, too, and the algorithm cannot make that choice for us. If you are a photographer who edits a large portion of your galleries in monochrome, you will not needto have two catalogs for that because you can simply build two profiles.

Personally, when I edit, I don't have a setquota of monochrome images and rather editbased on the imagecontent;however, for that, I have developed several monochrome presets that tend to suit most situations where I feel a monochrome edit is required. With that in mind, whether you edit manually or use an AI algorithm, you will still need to make those minor decisions on which images need to be in monochrome.

That aside, the actual process of setting up my own profile and then using it onunedited images was fast. I am basing this on my previous experience dealing with outsourcing editing and the steps I had to take to go from the initial orderemail I sent out to receiving edits back into Lightroom. As there are no human interactions, the process is as fast as you can make it, with the exception of the time ImagenAI spends to generate your profile for the first time.

My profile was very close to how I would edit myself, which was something I can evaluate because I used it on files I had already delivered a few years ago. I simply reset any and all adjustments I had made before applying the ImagenAI generated profile on them. The first thing I noticed was the consistency throughout scenes, which is something I found time-consuming to do manually.

With the exception of fourimages from the evening reception,which were on the warm side when shot, the rest of the reception sectionwas balanced throughout as were all other scenes, including the church.The consistency and harmonyof editing also translated into more challenging scenes, such as nighttime shots using ambient light only and high ISO.

Reviewing and comparing edits to the files I delivered, I can see how close ImagenAI was to my edits in mostcases. The ones that weren't as close would require me to simply adjust either the exposure slideror a combination of contrast and vibrancy. That aside, the edit would be near perfect to what I would be happy to deliver to my clients who know my way of editing and have become familiar with it during the booking process.

One thing I noticed was that, because the edits were so close to what I would feel happy to deliver to clients, I felt comfortable going through the catalog quite fast, and I was able to spend timefocused more on the fine details to check that the image looks good, such as any adjustments to the composition or whether I would need togo into Photoshop to remove small distracting details, or in fact whether I would deliver the image in monochrome instead.

As per the example video below, when you have finished fine-tuning the edits you received, you can send these adjustments to ImagenAIso it can learn and improve based on your current style, especially as it evolves over time.

My personal profile aside, I also tested editing with the help of Talents and chose "Dreamy Twist"profile by photographerMor Elnekave. Using Talents to edit is faster because you simply send off your fresh catalog by picking out the Talent you want to go with, and you will receive an email shortly after telling you that edits are ready to download, foregoing the process of setting up a personal profile.

Although the received edits are slightly "colder"and more vibrant, in regards to skin tones, than I would choose for my own edits, I can't fault them for not being consistent because they were throughout the whole gallery. In my opinion, although not my style of editing, images using this Talent's profile excelled in natural light and flash scenes. Examples below also received minor alterations in straightening the composition.

If you don't have access to any previous catalogs, picking the right Talent profile could be useful for those who want to use this service from time to time without building their own unique profile, simply because it's such a fast process and doesn't rely on using apost-processing company, which may have longer waiting times during peak periods.

Overall, both editing routes are equally simple, especially after you have created your first profile. I can see ImagenAI becoming an integral part of photographers' workflows not only to save time but also to provide an affordable editing service.Prices vary greatly across different post-processing providers and many use their own presets or styles of editing, meaning you need to spend time browsingand potentially also testing outdifferent options before you settle on one that represents your style the most.

Overall, I had a very positive experience with ImagenAI, and my only criticism, in regard to Talents, is simply something that will develop and improve over time. ImagenAI is constantly working on improving its services and takes user feedback into consideration, so it's a space to watch.

Personally, I enjoy the process, as there is no human interaction or reliance on an editor, which makes the whole experience smoother. In past, when dealing with outsourcing editing, besides uploading past catalogs, I also had to spend time on an email exchange, where I gave feedback on a number of test edits they hadperformed and had to request any changes I wantedto see in my gallery, followed with feedback after my order was delivered.

In addition,compared to outsourcing to a human editor, ImagenAI delivered my edits soon after I sent my unedited gallery. I hadn't even left my desk during that time. However, the time factor aside, what I found the most incredible was the algorithm's ability to adapt to my editing style. Sending final adjustments to ImagenAI after each gallery also allows the photographer's style to seamlessly develop alongside AI's help, which is something I would find more difficult if I was outsourcing editing toa human editor, especially if an editor I worked with closely was replaced.

I believethis product will appeal to photographers who want to be in control of their personal style of editing that their clients know them for but also want to reduce time spent on tasks that could be easily be performed by an algorithm. There is a discussion to be had on maintaining our unique vision as artists and whether AI jeopardizes it in any way; however, I think that ImagenAI is heading in the right direction.

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AI-Based Editing That Learns Your Style? Fstoppers Reviews ImagenAI - Fstoppers