Needless to say, Artificial Intelligence has become an essential tool in the photography industry. As a user and ambassador, Aftershoot has completely streamlined my workflows and has saved me thousands of hours worth of work.
But I’m not here to talk about how amazing it is. That would make this blog post an Ad and we don’t want that….
I want to talk about the following things I constantly see in our photography community.
“ It’s not working for me ”
” I tried it and I didn’t get good results”
” I don’t think AI is as good as everyone hypes it out to be”
With Ai and Aftershoot being the new technology everyone is raving about in our industry, I fully believe that we are missing the mark on a few key points about Ai and THAT is what I would like to cover in this blog:
—AI is not a magic button that instantly perfects your workflow. You’re not going to sign up for Aftershoot and immediately have enough time to go binge on the newest season of “ love is blind” on Netflix.
Ai is exactly what those letters mean: Artificial intelligence. It requires training, patience, and the right mindset to make it work for YOU.
Its results are a direct correlation of how much effort you’ve put into making that artificial intelligence adapt to your own unique workflow. It needs to learn from your style and you need to nurture it until you get optimal results.
If aftershoot is not working for you, it’s not because the technology is flawed, but because your expectations are. Your results with AI are a direct correlation f how much effort you put into training it.
With the key word being “ Training “ I believe there should be a change of mentality with tools like Aftershoot so, here it is…
AHEM!! ready for this?
AI Is Your New Employee—Train It Like One, damnit.
Think of Aftershoot as a brand new employee in your business. You’ve just hired someone with a basic understanding of their job, but like every new hire, they still need guidance to match your specific workflow and style. They’re not going to know everything on day 1. If you neglect training, don’t expect stellar results. The more you train your employee, the better it will perform and the more it will align with your preferences.
So, let’s talk about this New, insanely underpaid employee you just found at a random photography conference…
It will NEVER EVER EVER replace you or free up 100% of your time. That’s not its purpose. AI is a tool to assist you, not a replacement for your creative judgment.So, don’t ever expect to get home from a wedding, throw thousands of images into it and deliver the wedding blindly without checking it’s work. You’d never do that with a new hire so, why do it with a tool that is…. ready?…..Artificially intelligent.
If your new employee isn’t performing well, are you setting them up for success? Or are you sitting at your desk, frustrated, without giving it the proper feedback it needs to improve?
did you hire the employee in the middle of wedding season and throw it into the wolves? How would a new hire feel if you just said “ Hey here are a bunch of photos. look through my photos and edit them”If you’re using Aftershoot and feeling disappointed, take a step back and ask: Have I trained them properly?
Sooo….Have you trained Aftershoot for Success? if you’re having issues, that answer is probably a big old NO.
Let’s break it down into the two key features of Aftershoot: culling and editing.
Culling: Are You Providing Proper Feedback?
Aftershoot’s culling is designed to speed up the image selection process, but it won’t be perfect right out of the box. Here’s what you should be doing:
Are you correcting its mistakes? If Aftershoot misselects images, are you going back in and manually adjusting them? And are you doing it WITHIN aftershoot so it learns from the changes you’re making?
How often are you refining its selections? Once? Twice? A hundred times? The more you interact with it, the better it understands your preferences. That’s literally what AI is about ( And new hires! )
Here’s a quick timeline of how this works…The more you train it, the more it will know.
The more it knows, the less you’ll have to train it.
The less you have to train it, the more free time you’ll have.
The more time you have, the more episodes of “Love is blind” you’ll be able to binge.
Okay, so now that you’ve gone through culling, let talk about editing. This is very tricky too and there are tons of variables to get optimal results. But, like everything else AI, Aftershoot’s editing can save you hours of time……
if you train it correctly….
How many images are you using to create a profile? A handful of images won’t give AI enough data to accurately mimic your style. I have found that depending on how your editing style is, it might require more images in order to get optimal results.
Are you choosing the right images for training? If your training set is inconsistent, so will be your results.Try making multiple profiles if you shoot in vastly different locations/lighting conditions.
I personally think my profile is a great balance of everything so, I have built it based on 20,000 images instead of building multiple profiles. With that being said, It wouldn’t hurt to try out multiple profiles that work best for your specific style and shooting conditions.
And now…THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF THIS EQUATION….Are you fine-tuning your edits in Lightroom and feeding that data back into Aftershoot? based on all the people I talk to….probably not.
So, you’re kinda leaving your employee hanging because you’re not correcting it when it does something wrong.
Now, I will admit that Aftershoots interface is uhhh….subpar when it comes to communicating this feature. And by subpar, I mean it is absolutely awful. Whenever I want to update my profile I think…
”wow. This app really doesn’t want people to know you can update your profile, huh?”
Remember? That employee only has a basic understanding of how things are done. So, if you’re getting bad results, it’s probably more indicative of your lack of feedback you’re giving it. With edits and profiles, this is incredibly simple!
When you make adjustments to Aftershoot’s edits, do you re-upload those corrections via the “Improve your profile button” so it learns from them? If not, you’re missing a key step in the training process.
At the end of the day, success with Aftershoot ( or any Ai tool ) is going to mostly rely on effort put forth by the user. This is why photographers that have the most success with Ai, are generally the ones that are making the effort to understand it, train it and maintain it.
