Ever since artificial intelligence became a buzzword in literally every conversation, I’ve been curious about how it would impact my photography career. Up until now, there have been AI-centric tools to help further your editing. The Auto button in Lightroom Classic, intelligent searching in Excire, smart culling in AfterShoot, relighting a scene with Luminar Neo.

But what I’ve been waiting for, more than anything else, is a tool that can help me dramatically speed up my workflow. And I think I’ve found that tool, in ImagenAI.

What ImagenAI does

The premise around ImagenAI is simple, really. You upload a series of already edited photos to create a “profile” that’s catered to you. You can have multiple profiles for different clients or genres. And, you can even choose from premade profiles, created by other professionals in the industry.

From there, when you’re ready to import photos from your latest shoot, you go through the process like usual. Then you point ImagenAI to them. And in a matter of minutes, you have edited photos at your fingertips.

Now I know what you’re probably thinking. There’s no way an automated tool can do as good of a job as a human touch. And while that might be true, ImagenAI gets amazingly close. If nothing else, it’ll knock hours off your editing time.

How I tested

Last weekend I shot a series of events downtown for Earth Day, including a cleanup event. I decided to see how ImagenAI would do with this, and how the results compared to my own editing.

I had a bit of trouble at first, with the upload to ImagenAI failing. But creating Smart Previews in Lightroom Classic solved this issue for me, and I successfully uploaded 87 photos I had already culled with AfterShoot.

The error I received with ImagenAI. Once I built Smart Previews in Lightroom Classic, everything went smoothly.

I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of turnaround time. At its fastest, I thought I’d get the photos for download in the morning. But I was amazed when I got an email alert not even five minutes later, with my edited photos ready to go.

I clicked the Download button in ImagenAI and it replaced my original RAW files with the edited RAW files. The great thing here is that it kept my RAW files completely editable. I could see what ImagenAI did to my photo, including cropping and straightening the image. It was like getting RAW files back from a professional editor, but with lightning speed.

The results

Now, as I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t sure how ImagenAI would actually perform in terms of editing. But I was simply blown away.

There’s some fine-tuning I’ll probably have to do to my profile, but the changes are super minimal. I globally added a bit of contrast and vibrance, but that was something I had done specifically for this photoshoot originally.

Beyond that, the only real differences I saw were that some of the photos were just a tad flat. I could easily increase the black levels and bring up the highlights a bit for something that was almost identical to what I edited. But other photos … I actually liked them better than the edits I had made!

Here are a few comparisons, with my edit on the left, and the ImagenAI edit on the right: