Using Lightroom's AI-Powered Editing Tools: A Game-Changer for Photographers

One of the most exciting developments in the world of photography editing is the introduction of AI-powered tools by Adobe, specifically in their popular Lightroom software. The new features and capabilities are not only impressive but also incredibly useful for photographers who struggle with editing their images. In this article, we'll explore the use of these AI-powered editing tools, including the "Before and After" feature, custom profiles, light profiles, and cloud storage.

The Before and After Feature: A Revolutionary Approach to Editing

The "Before and After" feature in Lightroom is a game-changer for photographers. This tool allows you to see the difference between an original image and its edited version side by side, making it easier to track your edits and make adjustments as needed. The feature is particularly useful when working with images that have undergone significant changes. For example, when editing an image of a koi pond, you may want to adjust the contrast, exposure, and white balance to enhance the overall look of the photo.

When using the Before and After feature, you'll notice that it's not just a simple edit and save process. The software takes into account the specific characteristics of each image, including the white balance, color temperature, and contrast levels. This means that you can see exactly what edits were made to the image, making it easier to identify any areas that need further attention.

Custom Profiles: A Starting Point for Unique Looks

One of the most exciting features of Lightroom's AI-powered editing tools is the ability to create custom profiles. Traditionally, creating a profile took around 3,000 images or more, but with the introduction of AI-powered tools, this process has been significantly reduced. Now, you can create your own unique look for your images by uploading a preset and answering a series of questions about your preferences.

For example, if you want to create a profile that enhances warm tones in your images, you can upload a preset that showcases this style and answer questions like "How much warmth do you prefer?" or "What level of contrast would you like to achieve?" This way, the AI software takes into account your specific preferences and creates a profile that suits your needs.

Light Profiles: A New Way to Create Custom Profiles

In addition to creating custom profiles using traditional methods, Lightroom also offers light profiles as an alternative. Light profiles are essentially pre-made profiles that you can use to create unique looks for your images without having to start from scratch. The good news is that you don't need to have a huge amount of images to create a profile; even just a few examples will do.

When creating a light profile, you'll be prompted to select a preset and answer a series of questions about your desired look. This way, the AI software takes into account your preferences and creates a profile that suits your needs. The beauty of light profiles is that they're essentially customizable presets that can be used across multiple images.

Cloud Storage for Photographers: A Game-Changer for High-Volume Shoots

Another exciting development in Lightroom is the introduction of cloud storage specifically designed for photographers. This service allows you to store all your raw files using Adobe's lossless compression, which preserves image quality without sacrificing any detail. The best part? You can store up to 4 times more images than on other cloud solutions.

For photographers who shoot frequently, this feature is a game-changer. Imagine being able to access all your edited images in one place, without having to worry about running out of storage space. This feature is particularly useful for event photographers who come back with hundreds or even thousands of images each session.

Pricing and Subscription Models

The pricing for Lightroom's AI-powered editing tools starts at around $5 per image, although there are subscription models available that can provide a significant price break. If you're working in high volume, these plans can be a lifesaver. The free plan includes 1,500 image credits, which should get you through the initial bulk of your edited images.

Ultimately, whether or not you decide to subscribe to Lightroom's AI-powered editing tools depends on your individual needs and shooting frequency. If you're working with high volumes of images or want a more efficient way to edit your photos, these tools are definitely worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back everyone in this video we're going to take a look at imagine AI imagine AI is a service that is really awesome for Lightroom users particularly photographers who shoot large volumes of images so let's say you're an event photographer you're a photojournalist and you want a quick way to edit a whole bunch of images at one time this is a huge Lifesaver because imagine AI actually uses AI to do a lot of your image editing and you base it off of color profiles that either you create or you select from their Library I've talked about them before it is been a while I think it was last year when I last mentioned them and I want to talk a little bit about how far they've come because they've added a whole bunch of features that are massive time saers in here so for example culling is a big one so if you've got a session and you've got several hundred images and a lot of them are very like you can use AI to actually pick the best one and imagine will help you do that another thing that's really cool is things like subject masking they also have skin smoothing that's going to be coming soon so what I want to do today is walk you through the process show you how easy and seamless this is to use and uh maybe it's something you want to add to your own workflow so let's go ahead and get started so I've got Lightroom opened up right now and I want to talk just for a second about the catalog so there's basically two different ways that people tend to work in Lightroom you can either keep one master catalog full of everything or some people like to work in separate individual catalog specifically for clients I'm one of those people who works with one catalog and I literally have hundreds of thousands of images in this catalog now imagine AI will work with this and you can go in and specify exactly what you want imagine AI to deal with but I would also recommend though because the catalog is so big and it's going to have to call that out that a faster way to work is actually to keep a separate catalog so for this demo I've actually created a new catalog of images and there's a 100ish images in here which gives us a nice sampling and I've also got a variety of images in here for different situations so you can see just in different lighting situations and whatnot what imagine AI is going to do for you so the first thing we're going to do is launch imagine AI which is a stand load application all right so once the interface is loaded here you're going to see on the left hand side your little navigation there's home and there's two concepts here I want to talk about there's AI profiles and there's also projects now the way we work with imagine AI is we're going to work by the project so a project is the collection of images that you want edits applied to so that's our project now what we're going to do is those edits are called AI profiles now there's two types of profiles that we can be working with you can create your own profiles and this is a little bit involved because it's going to take uh they say about 3,000 images for imag AI to analyze and to create a profile 4 and those images need to reflect your specific style or you can use their own presets and I'll show you where those are so if we go under AI profiles you're going to see personal AI profiles that would be one that I would make and you're going to see Talent AI profiles so I'm going to click on that and you're going to see there's a whole bunch of them in here I can select from if I say compare Styles you can actually go in and get a preview and you can change the preview image if you want you can select which ones you want to preview and this is going to give you kind of an idea of what it is that you're going going for so the idea is that we're going to take a group of images in Lightroom we are going to send those to imagine AI is going to apply all the edits it's going to allow us to download those edits bring them into our catalog everything is done for us we don't have to go image by image so you can start to see where this is really handy if you have a ton of images that you're working with I'm going to go ahead for this example and I'm going to use one of their preset profiles I'm going to use this one called California Dreaming so basically just say use to edit and it's going to say which type of photos will be the most common in this project so it's going to create the project for us I'm going to go ahead and say landscape and nature I'll be honest they're all over the place but there are a lot of landscape and nature images in here and it's going to ask us where is our Lightroom catalog now I created a new catalog just for this and so I've already got that in a folder here so I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop that onto the interface here and it's going to ask us for a little few more setup items so you can see on the right hand side here uh these are all the photographs that I have here and they are cataloged in folders by date so that's what you're seeing there on the Le hand side of the screen for first thing I want to do is give this a name I'm just going to call this imagine demo for now and if we scroll down you're going to see some more options so the AI profile that we have is the California Dreaming profile then we have some additional a AI tools so we can ask it to crop if we want to do that uh I'm going to leave my crops as is but I do want everything straightened just in case the camera is a little bit off we can also add subject mask to all Lees and this is really nice let's say if you have a backlit subject and you want to mask out the subject Lightroom has some really powerful tools for that and this will go ahead and do that for you I'm not going to worry about that this round and then if we scroll down I can put some filters on here and this is great if you're using a much larger Lightroom catalog or you already know that you don't want certain images to be edited then you can go ahead and say the star rating needs to be five stars or two stars or whatever you want to set that at and it will only affect those images with star ratings another thing I need to do is go ahead and select all of these because these are all the images that I want affected this is a really easy project cuz I just want the entire catalog that I made uploaded but you can go in and specify specifically what images you want and the next thing I'm going to do is say upload and you're going to get a little status bar over on the right hand side up there and it's going to update our package on completion your projects will be uploaded so it's going to be working behind the scenes on this now I've actually found that this is not too bad with 100 images or so we're already 20% into this and it's only been a few seconds here but it does give you a status indication of where you are where your uploads are going so at this stage in the process imagine AI is actually using a DG compressor to actually give you compressed files for upload so it's not going to take as long as uploading all of your raw files so the upload is pretty fast will depend on your connection speed and probably some other variables but once you've uploaded it it's going to take a couple minutes to go through all the edits now I've given it 100 images it's already done obviously if I gave it a thousand or more images it's going to take a little bit longer but it's pretty much done and now it's ready for download to review so I'm going to go ahead and select that let's download the edits and it's going to give me a little warning it just says downloading the edits will overwrite and basically this means if you were to download it a second time it's going to delete anything you may have done in the middle but we're going to go ahead and continue because I haven't seen these yet and we are downloaded I'm going to go ahead and open my Lightroom catalog and uh we're going to see what it did here so it takes a second for these to build but you can see that already yeah it's straightening them and they look like they've been edited this is not bad so far and so what we're going to do is go in here and I'll select uh this image for instance let's go ahead and go into develop mode here and you can see that we've applied a curves adjustment here my sliders have been moved and it's fine-tuned everything to make this a really good looking at it so I'm going to do a quick before and after here's before here's after I love how it tone those greens really well that's actually very nice uh we'll check out a couple more here let's pick something that's very different like let's say here's a night image so let's go ahead and do a quick before and after on this one so here's before here's after and yeah it really brought up a lot of those Shadow details this is a really good way to work and of course you can see what edits were made over here on the right hand side and it's going to be different for each image it's not like it's just applying a preset so to speak on an IM image it's actually treating these on an image image basis now the other advantage to this is that let's say you have an image that it's pretty close but it's not quite how you like it the white balance needs to be tweaked a little bit or maybe your Heights need to be rolled off you can go in and actually do that but what this does is it gives you a really good starting point and like I said if you've got literally like hundreds or thousands of images from a session that you're trying to co down and get into a sizable number and manageable in terms of editing this is a really good tool so for example I'm going to scroll down here cuz I had some Oddball stuff at the end here yeah so for instance uh the koi pond image here this is an image that I typically like a lot more contrast on just because that water gets a little milky so one thing I can do is just change my edits I'm going to bring down the exposure somewhat let's go ahead and bump the contrast up and that way I get rid of a lot of that texture and I'm going to bring my whites up too because it's just a little too dark at this point and that's starting to look pretty good there so quick before and after there's the images that was shot and here's the edit so again it's really easy to go in and override anything but this just gets me to the end faster than it would be if I was doing each one of these on a case-by Case basis so I went with one of the preset profiles cuz I wanted to give you an example of how powerful this really is but if you want to start creating your own profiles essentially there's two ways you can go now the traditional way is to create your own custom profile which traditionally takes about 3,000 images or so for Imagine to actually learn the style that you're going after but there's another way that they've introduced called light profiles and this is really cool I'm going show this to you so if we go back over to the software here um when I select create your own profile and I'm under the AI profiles tab here it's going to give me an option here's the light personal AI profile and here's the personal AI profile now this one's obviously recommended but if you want an original way that's just kind of easy to get started I can go ahead and select this I can upload a preset at this point that I've developed and so that gives imagine a starting point so I'm going to make a preset we'll upload this imagine it's going to know what that is and then we're going to answer some questions about our preferences for white balance color tinting that kind of thing and then we've got a light profile that we can actually build on so that might be an interesting way for some people to work and another new feature with imagine that's really cool is they now offer cloud storage for photographers now this is the first cloud storage Solution that's just dedicated to raw files and the way that works is you have an option if you're going to store photos in the cloud where you can actually store all your Raw photos using their own compression it is a lossless compression that won't mess up with your images or destroy your image quality but it's going to give you four times as much space as you would have on on another Cloud solution so this is actually something that is very cool so I will drop a link in the show description if you want to learn more about imagine it's an awesome service especially when you have those High volumes of photos for people who shoot a lot of events stuff where you come back and you've got enormous amount of photos for each session and you want some help in editing those and so the pricing on this starts well you can sign up for an account for free and you get 1,500 image credits so that'll get you through the first, 1500 images and then there's basically two options that you have you can do a pay as you go which ends up being about5 sense an image and if you're working in higher volume and you want a bigger price break they do have some subscription models uh that are available for that as well so uh anyway check it out see if it's right for you I think it's a pretty awesome service especially when you're working in high volume if you have any questions drop them in the comments below I'll see you guys in the next video Until then laterwelcome back everyone in this video we're going to take a look at imagine AI imagine AI is a service that is really awesome for Lightroom users particularly photographers who shoot large volumes of images so let's say you're an event photographer you're a photojournalist and you want a quick way to edit a whole bunch of images at one time this is a huge Lifesaver because imagine AI actually uses AI to do a lot of your image editing and you base it off of color profiles that either you create or you select from their Library I've talked about them before it is been a while I think it was last year when I last mentioned them and I want to talk a little bit about how far they've come because they've added a whole bunch of features that are massive time saers in here so for example culling is a big one so if you've got a session and you've got several hundred images and a lot of them are very like you can use AI to actually pick the best one and imagine will help you do that another thing that's really cool is things like subject masking they also have skin smoothing that's going to be coming soon so what I want to do today is walk you through the process show you how easy and seamless this is to use and uh maybe it's something you want to add to your own workflow so let's go ahead and get started so I've got Lightroom opened up right now and I want to talk just for a second about the catalog so there's basically two different ways that people tend to work in Lightroom you can either keep one master catalog full of everything or some people like to work in separate individual catalog specifically for clients I'm one of those people who works with one catalog and I literally have hundreds of thousands of images in this catalog now imagine AI will work with this and you can go in and specify exactly what you want imagine AI to deal with but I would also recommend though because the catalog is so big and it's going to have to call that out that a faster way to work is actually to keep a separate catalog so for this demo I've actually created a new catalog of images and there's a 100ish images in here which gives us a nice sampling and I've also got a variety of images in here for different situations so you can see just in different lighting situations and whatnot what imagine AI is going to do for you so the first thing we're going to do is launch imagine AI which is a stand load application all right so once the interface is loaded here you're going to see on the left hand side your little navigation there's home and there's two concepts here I want to talk about there's AI profiles and there's also projects now the way we work with imagine AI is we're going to work by the project so a project is the collection of images that you want edits applied to so that's our project now what we're going to do is those edits are called AI profiles now there's two types of profiles that we can be working with you can create your own profiles and this is a little bit involved because it's going to take uh they say about 3,000 images for imag AI to analyze and to create a profile 4 and those images need to reflect your specific style or you can use their own presets and I'll show you where those are so if we go under AI profiles you're going to see personal AI profiles that would be one that I would make and you're going to see Talent AI profiles so I'm going to click on that and you're going to see there's a whole bunch of them in here I can select from if I say compare Styles you can actually go in and get a preview and you can change the preview image if you want you can select which ones you want to preview and this is going to give you kind of an idea of what it is that you're going going for so the idea is that we're going to take a group of images in Lightroom we are going to send those to imagine AI is going to apply all the edits it's going to allow us to download those edits bring them into our catalog everything is done for us we don't have to go image by image so you can start to see where this is really handy if you have a ton of images that you're working with I'm going to go ahead for this example and I'm going to use one of their preset profiles I'm going to use this one called California Dreaming so basically just say use to edit and it's going to say which type of photos will be the most common in this project so it's going to create the project for us I'm going to go ahead and say landscape and nature I'll be honest they're all over the place but there are a lot of landscape and nature images in here and it's going to ask us where is our Lightroom catalog now I created a new catalog just for this and so I've already got that in a folder here so I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop that onto the interface here and it's going to ask us for a little few more setup items so you can see on the right hand side here uh these are all the photographs that I have here and they are cataloged in folders by date so that's what you're seeing there on the Le hand side of the screen for first thing I want to do is give this a name I'm just going to call this imagine demo for now and if we scroll down you're going to see some more options so the AI profile that we have is the California Dreaming profile then we have some additional a AI tools so we can ask it to crop if we want to do that uh I'm going to leave my crops as is but I do want everything straightened just in case the camera is a little bit off we can also add subject mask to all Lees and this is really nice let's say if you have a backlit subject and you want to mask out the subject Lightroom has some really powerful tools for that and this will go ahead and do that for you I'm not going to worry about that this round and then if we scroll down I can put some filters on here and this is great if you're using a much larger Lightroom catalog or you already know that you don't want certain images to be edited then you can go ahead and say the star rating needs to be five stars or two stars or whatever you want to set that at and it will only affect those images with star ratings another thing I need to do is go ahead and select all of these because these are all the images that I want affected this is a really easy project cuz I just want the entire catalog that I made uploaded but you can go in and specify specifically what images you want and the next thing I'm going to do is say upload and you're going to get a little status bar over on the right hand side up there and it's going to update our package on completion your projects will be uploaded so it's going to be working behind the scenes on this now I've actually found that this is not too bad with 100 images or so we're already 20% into this and it's only been a few seconds here but it does give you a status indication of where you are where your uploads are going so at this stage in the process imagine AI is actually using a DG compressor to actually give you compressed files for upload so it's not going to take as long as uploading all of your raw files so the upload is pretty fast will depend on your connection speed and probably some other variables but once you've uploaded it it's going to take a couple minutes to go through all the edits now I've given it 100 images it's already done obviously if I gave it a thousand or more images it's going to take a little bit longer but it's pretty much done and now it's ready for download to review so I'm going to go ahead and select that let's download the edits and it's going to give me a little warning it just says downloading the edits will overwrite and basically this means if you were to download it a second time it's going to delete anything you may have done in the middle but we're going to go ahead and continue because I haven't seen these yet and we are downloaded I'm going to go ahead and open my Lightroom catalog and uh we're going to see what it did here so it takes a second for these to build but you can see that already yeah it's straightening them and they look like they've been edited this is not bad so far and so what we're going to do is go in here and I'll select uh this image for instance let's go ahead and go into develop mode here and you can see that we've applied a curves adjustment here my sliders have been moved and it's fine-tuned everything to make this a really good looking at it so I'm going to do a quick before and after here's before here's after I love how it tone those greens really well that's actually very nice uh we'll check out a couple more here let's pick something that's very different like let's say here's a night image so let's go ahead and do a quick before and after on this one so here's before here's after and yeah it really brought up a lot of those Shadow details this is a really good way to work and of course you can see what edits were made over here on the right hand side and it's going to be different for each image it's not like it's just applying a preset so to speak on an IM image it's actually treating these on an image image basis now the other advantage to this is that let's say you have an image that it's pretty close but it's not quite how you like it the white balance needs to be tweaked a little bit or maybe your Heights need to be rolled off you can go in and actually do that but what this does is it gives you a really good starting point and like I said if you've got literally like hundreds or thousands of images from a session that you're trying to co down and get into a sizable number and manageable in terms of editing this is a really good tool so for example I'm going to scroll down here cuz I had some Oddball stuff at the end here yeah so for instance uh the koi pond image here this is an image that I typically like a lot more contrast on just because that water gets a little milky so one thing I can do is just change my edits I'm going to bring down the exposure somewhat let's go ahead and bump the contrast up and that way I get rid of a lot of that texture and I'm going to bring my whites up too because it's just a little too dark at this point and that's starting to look pretty good there so quick before and after there's the images that was shot and here's the edit so again it's really easy to go in and override anything but this just gets me to the end faster than it would be if I was doing each one of these on a case-by Case basis so I went with one of the preset profiles cuz I wanted to give you an example of how powerful this really is but if you want to start creating your own profiles essentially there's two ways you can go now the traditional way is to create your own custom profile which traditionally takes about 3,000 images or so for Imagine to actually learn the style that you're going after but there's another way that they've introduced called light profiles and this is really cool I'm going show this to you so if we go back over to the software here um when I select create your own profile and I'm under the AI profiles tab here it's going to give me an option here's the light personal AI profile and here's the personal AI profile now this one's obviously recommended but if you want an original way that's just kind of easy to get started I can go ahead and select this I can upload a preset at this point that I've developed and so that gives imagine a starting point so I'm going to make a preset we'll upload this imagine it's going to know what that is and then we're going to answer some questions about our preferences for white balance color tinting that kind of thing and then we've got a light profile that we can actually build on so that might be an interesting way for some people to work and another new feature with imagine that's really cool is they now offer cloud storage for photographers now this is the first cloud storage Solution that's just dedicated to raw files and the way that works is you have an option if you're going to store photos in the cloud where you can actually store all your Raw photos using their own compression it is a lossless compression that won't mess up with your images or destroy your image quality but it's going to give you four times as much space as you would have on on another Cloud solution so this is actually something that is very cool so I will drop a link in the show description if you want to learn more about imagine it's an awesome service especially when you have those High volumes of photos for people who shoot a lot of events stuff where you come back and you've got enormous amount of photos for each session and you want some help in editing those and so the pricing on this starts well you can sign up for an account for free and you get 1,500 image credits so that'll get you through the first, 1500 images and then there's basically two options that you have you can do a pay as you go which ends up being about5 sense an image and if you're working in higher volume and you want a bigger price break they do have some subscription models uh that are available for that as well so uh anyway check it out see if it's right for you I think it's a pretty awesome service especially when you're working in high volume if you have any questions drop them in the comments below I'll see you guys in the next video Until then later\n"