When AfterShoot Edits was first announced, I was pretty excited. I had long been a user of AfterShoot’s culling technology, helping me to reduce my workload by focusing on the best photographs from a photoshoot. Throughout my busy summer, I often relied on Imagen, another AI editing tool, to help me edit some of my images. So how would AfterShoot Edits compare?

While I haven’t gotten to play around with the software yet, AfterShoot COO Justin Benson walked me through what to expect.

Seamless integration with AI culling

When AfterShoot Edits launches, users will be happy to see that it’s built right into the existing core AfterShoot culling program. You’ll be able to cull, edit and export, all in one fell swoop.

When you add an album, you’ll be asked if you want to start by either culling or editing your images. This makes it easy so that if you’ve already culled your images in another program, or are otherwise only interested in the Edits feature, you can do so easily.

“It’s all together and in one app,” says Justin. “It’s all part of AfterShoot; that’s our goal is to make it one big suite. Right now, as we build and develop it, you could either cull or edit, or both. The only barrier you have to jump through is that you need to have a Lightroom Classic catalog. So if you cull, then you have to open them in Lightroom before you edit.

“The good news is it’s super fast to edit — faster than culling. It was done before my coffee was done. So you’ll start within your AfterShoot module as you normally would, and you can start by just culling first and then going to the editing module and start from there. Or you can just start with editing if you want. You can bring in your Lightroom Classic catalog, connect it, and let it do its thing.”

Currently AfterShoot Edits will only be compatible with Lightroom Classic.

The nice thing is that if you’ve culled elsewhere, you can filter your images in AfterShoot by metadata like stars and colors , so you don’t have to edit an entire folder or collection, for instance.

Creating your custom profile

The power behind AfterShoot Edits is based on uploading existing photos that you’ve already processed to the program. This process happens before you can really harness the power of AfterShoot Edits, and helps to develop a profile on which to edit your future photos.

The great thing here is that you can also train AfterShoot Edits as you move forward, by uploading your finished edits. This is handy if you make any changes in Lightroom Classic, to make sure AfterShoot knows that, while they helped you get your photos edited, there was some further tweaking needed. You can also create multiple AI presets, and make presets based on image type (RAW or JPEG), as well as color or black and white.

This all sounds familiar … so how is this different from other options on the market?

Being an Imagen user, what Justin told me sounded slightly familiar. But there’s a couple pretty big differences.

With Imagen, you’re charged per image. And you’re charged extra for cropping and straightening. While this works and the pricing that Imagen uses is perfectly feasible, AfterShoot sees a slightly different model. Instead of charging per image, AfterShoot will charge a subscription price. No payments per image, no worrying about budgets for each project.

“It’s a flat fee service. We haven’t released any pricing yet, but it’s going to be a flat fee. So you’re able to just pay and edit all you want, play with profiles and different things, and not have to worry about what it costs per image.”

All of the editing is also done on your computer, meaning you don’t need wifi or any network connection. This is huge, as it allows me to edit on-the-go where there might not be internet. Even editing on a plane or in a car (as a passenger) becomes an option here!

It all comes down to saving time

With Justin being a wedding photographer, he’s often dealing with multiple clients at the same time. That’s why AI editing is so convenient — because it’s a major time-saver.

“I shoot a lot of weddings on top of running AfterShoot. So my schedule is extremely full — I’m always working. Because we have AI editing, this is the first time in five or six years that I’ve taken pictures on my own of just stuff that I wanted to take pictures of. It’s because I don’t have to deal with editing, I don’t have to deal with culling. I can just go take my camera somewhere, shoot it, let it cull and edit. And then I just look at it.

“That’s what I think a lot of us fell in love with when we started with photography way back when. We wanted to take pictures of stuff we like taking pictures of.

“So it’s really cool that AI is actually coming in and letting me go back to that feeling, letting me kind of dive back into that early love of photography. That creativity that, you know, it’s not just the business. It’s, hey, I’m gonna go take pictures of everything.”

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