By now we’ve all heard that AI can edit your photos. However, as professional wedding & portrait photographers, we have a serious question: can we trust it? How accurate and reliable is an AI wedding photo editor? In other words, are the results consistently good? How much time can it actually save us, without sacrificing our artistic creativity?
Indeed, these are very good questions to ask, because honestly, we ought to be skeptical! AI isn’t magic, and, let’s be honest, the results from early-generation AI photo editors were not very good. Today, however, things are very different; and that is why we are checking out some new updates from Aftershoot, one of our favorite AI photo editors.
Aftershoot has already done a great job of answering the above questions with a resounding “yes!” Indeed, you can trust it. Yes, the results are consistently good, and improving now with Aftershoot Edits 2.0; it saved many professionals a ton of time. We’re here today to see if the quality can get even better, the results even more consistent. So, let’s dive in!
So, Can AI Photo Editing Be Trusted?
Ethical and moral dilemmas aside, today we have a relatively simple question with hopefully a simple answer: “can we trust AI?” As professional wedding & portrait photographers, we followed the earliest developments in AI-based photo editing, and, unfortunately, the quality of the results were underwhelming at best. Equally frustrating, of course, is inconsistency; sometimes the results were quite good, and other times, terrible..
So, with that in mind, I have extensively tested Aftershoot as an AI photo editor and maintain an active paid account because it really does work. I’ve trusted it to edit literally hundreds of thousands of photos, and that number is not an exaggeration!
However, the whole point of this article is for you to NOT just take our word for it. This spring, (2024) Aftershoot has debuted a host of updates, including Aftershoot Edits 2.0, as well as the SOOAS (Straight out of Aftershoot) gallery. We’ll dive in-depth with both of these news items, but suffice it to say, Aftershoot Edits 2.0 is going to bring more consistency and time-saving features to all of you wedding & portrait photographers who are looking to use AI to edit your images. Furthermore, the latter (SOOAS) is simply a gallery of PROOF that Aftershoots delivers the goods in terms of being trusted by many working professionals to edit their photos.
AI Wedding & Portrait Photo Editors | Consistency Is Hard!
Let’s be honest: it’s not very difficult to edit one or two photos to perfection. A few YouTube tutorials, a little practice, and you can create at least one masterpiece! What is extremely difficult is repeating that process thousands of times and delivering consistently high-quality results.
Our human eyes just have difficulty staying consistent when editing hundreds or thousands of photos; we inevitably seem to gradually edit a little bit darker, and/or a little bit warmer/colder, for whatever medical or scientific reason. If you’re an aspiring portrait or wedding photographer, or already a part/full-time pro, you know how frustrating it is! This can lead to many additional hours spent going back and forth to smoo th out inconsistencies. It also causes us to distrust the most important editing tool: our own vision!
Mathematically, this should be an easy problem to overcome. Simply keep exposure/WB within a certain range, right? And yet, it’s very difficult to accomplish this while also achieving a creative, stylized look, too.
An AI photo editor can do a great job on editing a select few photos captured in ideal lighting conditions, however, in our experience, when it comes to keeping your creative vision consistent across all manner of challenging lighting conditions and different subjects, it gets very difficult to rely on AI.
Straight Out Of Aftershoot (A Gallery Of Before & After Photos)
So, one of the best ways to prove whether a tool can be reliable or not is to look at a large amount of imagery from multiple artists who are actively using it. Judging an AI’s ability to edit correctly must go far beyond any 5-10 cherry-picked examples found on any sales page! Indeed, verifying trust and reliability always involves looking over as many photos as possible, using a keen eye for quality and consistency.
This is the very reason why Aftershoot created the “Straight Out Of Aftershoot” collection of images. What is “SOOAS”? It’s evidence/proof of amazing consistency; a gallery containing dozens of photos from diverse, dramatically different lighting conditions. Contributors include many different portrait & wedding photographers, and the results speak for themselves: As an AI Photo Editor, Aftershoot delivers amazing consistency.
The thing to keep in mind when browsing sooas.club is this: Aftershoot is able to offer consistency to a diverse range of personal creative styles, whether it is bright, warm, and/or faded, or maybe dark, contrasty, and moody. Whatever your style is, you have a unique look, and you want that unique look to be achieved consistency with minimal fine-tuning. All the images you see in the gallery are pretty much straight out of the Aftershoot AI, with either zero or extremely minimal fine-tuning applied.
Simply put, this is an AI you can trust to deliver good results, consistently, with minimal additional effort.
Aftershoot Edits 2.0 | Improvements & Features
Aftershoot has recently released their latest update, Aftershoot Edits 2.0, which includes other time-saving, workflow and consistency-related improvements. We’ll mention them briefly, but simply put, what we’re getting is more reliability and less time spent in front of a computer.
Tab Bar – Import, Cull, & Edit
The way Aftershoot works, you load up their proprietary software and use it to import photos from a memory card, cull (sort) them, and/or edit them. You don’t have to have already created a Lightroom Catalog of your photos; Aftershoot can handle everything for you!
The Tab Bar is your main workflow up in Aftershoot, and now it allows you to seamlessly move back and forth between culling and editing raw & JPG photos, all within Aftershoot. Of course, any time you want to go from Aftershoot to an actual Lightroom Catalog, or Adobe Photoshop, it’s as simple as dragging and dropping your images from Aftershoot to your Lightroom desktop shortcut, or wherever your Lightroom icon resides, and a Lightroom catalog will be generated.
(If you’ve already created a Lightroom Catalog that contains images you’ve edited in Aftershoot, you can simply update their metadata from within Lightroom, and the Aftershoot AI edits, including culling ratings/labels etc, will appear. This is highly recommended for long-term storage & archival needs, of course!)
Improve Exposure & White Balance adjustments
The two most important settings for color-correction are Exposure and White Balance. (After editing literally millions of photos here at our studio, with a team of dozens of photographers, we can say without a doubt that these are the two settings every editor spends the most time on.)
So, that is why we’re thrilled to hear that these are the settings Aftershoot’s AI has improved with Edits 2.0. This presents the greatest opportunity for reducing editing times even further!
What this update means, technically speaking, is that even if your photo shoot includes dramatically different lighting conditions, if you find yourself moving from harsh sunlight to dimly lit indoor settings rapidly & frequently, (as wedding photographers almost always seem to!) …Aftershoot will keep your exposures and color balance more consistent.
This is particularly difficult when it comes to achieving a unique, creative style. It’s one thing to keep edits consistent in terms of basic color correction, but if you have an editing style that is high-key, low-key, warm, cool, etc, …that is where things get tricky. However, that is where Aftershoot’s Personal AI Editing Profile comes in; the Aftershoot AI is actually capable of assimilating your own creative style by looking at how you’ve edited your own, existing photos. In fact, the more preexisting photos you feed it, the better it gets, and the AI is designed to fully train itself using thousands of your photos!
So, quite simply, yes, it delivers consistency while maintaining your creative vision.
AI Masking
Harnessing Adobe’s incredible advancements in subject identification and masking tools, the Aftershoot Subject Masking tool can be customized to edit the subject of your photo separately from its surroundings. Alternatively, you have the option to automatically create a subject mask, but still apply the same edits to the whole image so you can fine-tune one or the other afterwards.
Advanced Cropping & Improved Straightening
Some aspects of editing are very simple: For example, when it comes to your horizon, it’s either straight or it isn’t. Why waste any more time than you have to on such a straightforward correction? (Pun intended) Thankfully, this is one area where AI is just flat-out going to save you more and more time; turn these features on and let Aftershoot’s improved algorithms level your photos more consistently.
Plus, you now have two options for cropping; Loose Cropping will simply make sure your subjects stay within the frame, and Aggressive Cropping will crop to put your subjects in the center of the frame.
Creator Styles
For those who don’t have many thousands of their own photos already edited, Aftershoot’s Creator Styles have been a fast-track way to jump right in and create beautiful results. Aftershoot creators include photographers like Esteban Gil, Lilly Red, and Joy Zamora, with more on the way. You can get 500 edits free for each profile. and 100% of the fee goes to the creators.
NOTE: The Creator Styles are available in Aftershoot’s Essentials plan, at $20/month (billed annually) and a Personal AI profile (one) is available in Aftershoot’s Pro plan, at $40/month (billed annually) …with additional Personal AI profiles being available in either their Max plan, ($60/mo, billed annually) or added individually for $70/year.
Platform Compatibility
As if it wasn’t enough that Aftershoot is the only AI photo editing software to support both Adobe Lightroom (Classic) and Capture One, we now have a complete host of platform compatibility for those who are familiar with Adobe’s non-destructive work environment. That’s right, Aftershoot is now fully compatible with both Adobe Lightroom (Cloud) and Lightroom “Classic”, plus, Adobe Bridge, and Adobe Camera Raw!
This effectively means that virtually any workflow using the Adobe ecosystem can now harness the advantages of Aftershoot. Again, with both culling and editing, and compatibility with both Adobe software(s) and Capture One, Aftershoot is by far the most widely supported AI photo editor that we know of.
Conclusion | AI Photo Editors & Your Future
Aftershoot Edits was already one of our favorite choices and a top contender for the best AI wedding & portrait photo editor on the market, and from what we can tell so far, this latest update is a worthwhile improvement. If you were on the fence or considering different options before, we strongly recommend checking out their pricing plans, and seeing if one of them fits your needs! The future of AI photo editing is definitely arriving presently.
Aftershoot Edits 2.0 Free Trial & Discount
Aftershoot offers a 30-day free trial to anyone who wants to take their AI for a spin. (Yes, with the release of Aftershoot Edits 2.0, that includes anyone who has previously used a 30-day trial, too!) This is a trial of their “Pro” subscription, so that means you get unlimited access to all of the features including AI culling and AI editing. You’ll have access to their catalog of more than 30 AI styles, and you’ll even be able to try out one Personal AI Editing Profile of your own!
If you end the 30-day trial and like your experience, you can get a 20% discount off a paid subscription by using this link here.
