Over on my wedding photography website I’ve just posted a review of Aftershoot for wedding photographers, an AI tool for culling photoshoots before you start editing them. I’m also planning to write a review of ImagenAI, an AI tool for editing.
The long and short of it is that I’m still using ImagenAI for my weddings as a starting point that gets me way closer than just applying my Lightroom preset (which is really all that ImagenAI is doing, plus a couple of extra bells and whistles), but I’ve given up on Aftershoot.
I think that culling is far too personal a process to trust to an algorithm, even one that claims to ‘learn’ from your corrections. Although many big names are seemingly queuing up to get their face and website link on Aftershoot’s home page, proclaiming it to be the saviour of their sanity and shaving hours off their process, I think it can only really achieve those goals if you’re willing to accept there’s almost certainly better images in the pile it rejected, or at least images you’d have liked to keep, but that you don’t really care so long as it’s ‘close enough’.
In fact “close enough” is exactly how one of those ambassadors described it to me at a conference last year. In practice I’ve found that ‘close enough’ isn’t good enough for me, so I picked apart why I don’t like it for your entertainment.
You may love Aftershoot, but I don’t trust it and find the changes required to my workflow were more frustrating than time-saving, so it’s not for me. Controversial!
