Using Automation and AI to Enhance Photography Workflows with Frederick Van Johnson

Scott Wyden Kivowitz: This is part two of my conversation with Frederick van Johnson from this week weekend photo. I hope you listened to part one already, and [00:01:00] if you haven't hit pause, go listen to part one right now, and then come back and listen to part two as we wrap things up about the future of photography. Without further ado, let's get right into part two right now. so, as we get closer to wrapping up the, the last, the, the next thing I want, we wanted to, oh, no, already. Automation in album and book design --- Scott Wyden Kivowitz: The next thing we wanted to touch on was like automation that we're seeing in album and book designs. You know, there's, there's a bunch of, you know, and, and you know, th this whole, this whole conversation. Yes. We started with ai. We, we've been talking about ai, but a lot of this is just automation. Automation makes our lives simpler no matter what it is. Right. I mean, I don't know. I, I can program my garage door so that when I get home it recognizes I'm home and then my garage door opens like, Automation is beautiful. So, I don't do that cuz I don't want somebody random just walking into my garage, but Yeah, Frederick Van Johnson: it's Scott Wyden Kivowitz: So anyway [00:02:00] Yeah. yeah. So album and book design, there's a bunch of different tools out there that do album and book design. Even now some of these companies are starting to do social design as well, social media design, using their same software they built for album design to now do social design. So, what are your thoughts on, on, on using these sort of tools to, to do client books, to do personal books, to do wedding albums, whatever it is. Yeah, what do you think about those? Frederick Van Johnson: Brilliant. It's brilliant and much needed. It's a, it's another, it's another thing, right? You feel like. You know, I know a lot of photographers that I know will say, yeah, I gotta, I gotta have my fingers on everything and I have to build my layouts and, you know, only I know how to do this. And, you know, that's part of my sauce. Sure. For those people, this is not for them because they find a happiness in building the ship, in the bottle. Right. They find gratification in the journey, which there's nothing wrong with that of course, [00:03:00] but for the other people that find that drudgery, you know, that kind of work. Drudgery, I'm not creative. I don't know if I should have one shot on this page or three, or, you know, and composition. She's looking that way. Should she be looking towards the seam of the book? You know, all these decisions that the software already knows and it can do that. It already, and if the software can look at the shot too and place it in a frame on the page correctly, i e not cutting people's heads off and doing all of the right stuff. At the very least it gives you. Hours and hours of your day back when it comes to lay doing this kinda layout. Right? And at the end of the day, you still have control over it, right? Because you, you know, you're finished and you're like, oh yeah, I should, probably should put an Jenny in that spot and let's move that one. Or maybe this one would be better as a full page. But it gives you a, a brilliant headstart, much like chat g p t, right? If you're you, you gotta, like for me, I had to write my intro for this last conference. I could have written it [00:04:00] myself or copy and pasted one of my old ones and changed it or done whatever. But you release chat g p t on it and it pulls something out that only needs a few minor, a few minor changes in tonal updates. Yeah. Go fix that for me. Yeah, my Chad G T dog. Same thing for these for album design, these kinds of things, you know, just to. The whole point of technology, the one of the main, not the, not the only singular point, but one of the main points of technology is to make our lives easier, to free us up to do the, the core thing that we enjoy doing. That's what it is. All this other stuff that's kind of hanging around, like in photography, right? The, our, our core goal is to tell stories or create Imageners that others enjoy. That's it. And, and everything between that finished bit and what we see in our mind's eye is, Resistance, right? It's okay. I gotta understand how focal lengths work. Okay, I gotta understand [00:05:00] this. Oh, half pressed to focus, oh, focus area. This, am I shooting RAW or jpeg? You know, am I shooting high enough resolution? Oh, I have my Imageners now. No, I gotta build an album from them. I gotta figure out this software to build the albums, you know, to give to my, all that stuff is drudgery in the middle. And when software can pop in there and, and say, Hey, Frederick, let me take that off your plate, man, you look like you're stressed, you know? Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah. Frederick Van Johnson: thank you. Please take it. You know, you can do it better than I can you take it, you know, I'm gonna check your work, but you take it, you know, and we'll, we'll keep pressing forward. So, no, I think those, those, I think we're at the beginning of those as well, right? Because as things, as things change and technologies change, and new tools pop up for us as content creators to use, so will the, the demand for how you present the final output change as well. And these companies, We'll also hopefully follow suit and keep giving us great things. So yeah, I'm [00:06:00] bullish on the whole thing. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: I think one of the important words that you just used was layout, right? Whereas a lot of album and book design tools and software, they use templates, right? Where it's, here's your starting point. Drag your photos in, drag your photos in, or just add all, and that's it, right? And then you have to go and rearrange. Whereas the more modern solutions, the more intelligent ones, they're analyzing your. Your photos, ratings, they're analyzing the the times of when the photos were captured. They're analyzing the aesthetics of which way they're looking, if you know, and if they're color of black and white, and then they're laying it out in a way that makes sense based on those photos, not just templatizing your, your design. And I think that's where, and again, as you said, you can adjust, but giving you that starting point that's more personal to what you actually shot and not just the template. Frederick Van Johnson: Yeah, [00:07:00] yeah. And if these, and if these softwares can kind of either through input from you or just learning over time, figure out what your preferences are. Like, you know, Scott always does X, Y, and Z, so I'm just gonna assume that he wants to do X, Y, and Z with these photos. Right. You know, so if, if it's, if it has that, that level of ability to infer what the user wants to, then yeah. I mean these, these tools become like little assistance for us to let us do more and, you know, with less time. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah. Or like, Scott, for some reason, you keep putting the person with the f with the seam directly down the person's face. Stop doing it. I'm not gonna let you do it anymore. Frederick Van Johnson: Right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. One of the Scott Wyden Kivowitz: doing stupid things, Photo contests judged by AI --- Frederick Van Johnson: one of, it's interesting you say that one of the things I, I was speaking with the folks on, and one of the things that they're, they're working on, actually it's public, so I can say it is the idea of using artificial intelligence, and [00:08:00] this is gonna be controversial Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Mm-hmm. Frederick Van Johnson: using artificial intelligence to judge photography contests. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Oh, Frederick Van Johnson: Imagine that. So, positives and negatives, right? So on the positive side, sure. It's a photo contest. You can give it the parameters of the contest. You can you know, do all, all the rules can be baked in so that anything that doesn't adhere to the rules of the contest immediately reject it. What a great filter. Right? Instead of us, this was supposed to be a contest about flowers. Why is there a car in here Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah. I mean, as a first, as a, as a first pass, I can see that being helpful. Just so I don't have to look at non flower photos for a flower contest, Frederick Van Johnson: but that's a low hanging fruit, right? That first filter to, to reject things that don't adhere to what the contest is about. The second level is, like you're saying, these ais understand lighting composition, exposure, you know, to some degree creativity, arguably, right? So they, [00:09:00] and they can hopefully tell what is a, a, a good photograph again, subjective, right. And controversial. What is a good photograph versus what is a bad photograph and say, okay, this one can go forward to the next stage because of these reasons, this one cannot. So, yeah, so it, I think though the tech can be used in some, some uses to be a, you know, a, a standalone judge of a group of photos to say, out of all these photos, These three are the best, you know, so winner, and I'm gonna rank 'em like this. So you can do that instantly, I think. Should we do it? No, I don't think so. I think the way that the technology should be used is a, well, for one, I don't want a robot telling me what's good or not, right? I really value the opinions of other people and other humans that know photography, right? So I want that in there. Not some machine learned amalgam of, [00:10:00] of, you know, data that you apply to my photo. I want, I want subjectivity when people are looking at my photos. So under that light, I think it's the, this, these, those kinds of technologies will very clearly have a dial of how much you want their input, but they will be at the beginning of the flow. So maybe even at ingest when you upload a photo instantly. Wouldn't it be great for the software or the page Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Denied it's not a flower. Frederick Van Johnson: tell you and why? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. To tell you, Nope, this, this does not fit the criterion of this, the blah, blah, blah. Here's a reminder of the rules. Boom. Go for Scott Wyden Kivowitz: so that I could see being very useful to me as I'm, I'm somebody who, I don't like photo contests personally. I don't submit to photo contests cause I don't enjoy them. But to me, if I was to submit to a photo contest, I would want to be told ahead of time, you know, we are using AI to either. Prevent you know, [00:11:00] inaccurate submissions or whatever you wanna call it. Or, or I would wanna be told your photos are being judged by ai, like not by humans, because that, that makes a big difference of whether somebody's going to submit or not. For sure. Frederick Van Johnson: No, a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. It should be dis, I think it should be disclosed wherever used to be honest with you, I think, you know, it should, wherever AI is being implemented to a degree, right? Like I don't need to know that it's. You know, helping me, you know, it's, I'm in, I'm sitting in a public space inside, and AI is helping regulate the temperature in that room. I don't need to know that, you know, that level, but if it's something that's more sensitive, like it's judging a photo contest or it wrote some copy that I'm reading that I could make the assumption was written by human, I would, I, I feel like right now at this stage in time, I want some sort of marker on there that says this was at least partially assisted by artificial intelligence, or written completely by [00:12:00] artificial intelligence. Digital marking images that use AI --- Frederick Van Johnson: Same with images, right? I want, I want, you know, as, as Mid Journey and all of these generative AI technologies get better and better. The distinction between what is a real photograph and what is. What doesn't exist in the world anywhere is becoming harder and harder to discern. So I, and I don't know even, I don't even know if this is possible, but I want some sort of marker on Imageners or somewhere on a page that where necessary, not always, but where necessary. That gives me a hint of, oh, this AI was involved in this composition. If it makes sense, right? If it's, if for example, here's where it would make sense. I'm looking at a magazine and who reads magazines in here, but I'm looking at a magazine and there's a shot of some delicious, delicious chocolate cake in there for a Betty Crocker ad, right? And the, and the whole thing could be AI generated. I have no idea if it was or not, cuz it looks photorealistic, it looks delicious and all [00:13:00] that. If it was generated by AI because it's a cake that they're trying to get me to buy, or a cake mix, I want to know. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: disclosed. Frederick Van Johnson: I wouldn't disclose it. If it's just a photo of a birthday party with a kid in there and there's a cake on the table and it's not about the cake, then I don't care. It could be that that cake could be AI generated. I don't care. It's in service of the story. But I think we need a level of disclosure and genuineness as we, as we start to move forward with this stuff. And it, and it takes root. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah, yeah. I, I, I think if, if it does get incorporated into magazines like that it's going to quickly filter out the ethical versus non-ethical publications for sure. The ones who don't disclose when it comes to important things like an ad, for example. Frederick Van Johnson: I mean, I'd like to see a whole here. Here's an idea. Maybe you could do this guy. I, I, would like to see a whole satirical AI driven magazine, much like the Onion, but AI driven with real, [00:14:00] with gen, like fake news stories, but in AI generated photographs that go along with them to illustrate it. I would've seen that, you know, that'd be Scott Wyden Kivowitz: That. Yeah. Someone's, someone's gonna do it. It's only a matter of time before somebody does that. A Frederick Van Johnson: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: So is there anything as let's to to wrap things up you know, is there anything going on with, at over atw at folic, at Smugmug, anything that you wanna share that that's going on, on, on your, on your side of things? What's up with Flickr and Smugmug? --- Frederick Van Johnson: Not particularly. You know, one thing I would just throw out there and I have a question throw back at you. Well, one thing I would throw out there is about Flickr, right? I've been talking since, since the acquisition happened about a year ago. I've been talking a lot about Flickr and speaking with a lot of different people about Flickr. And, you know, the consensus, general consensus is, oh, Flickr, they're still alive, or, or it's either that or I still use Flickr and I've been using Flickr beginning of time and I have no intention on stopping using Flickr because it is [00:15:00] my operating system for my photography or sharing my photography. So one of the things, you know, part, and I was in that first group, I know I've, I've kept since 2008, I've had an active Flickr account and I've had an active Flickr group. My Flickr group for this weekend photo has over a hundred thousand people in there. You know, it is, it's not, I think it has over a hundred thousand or maybe a hundred thousand Imageners. I dunno. I have to look, but it's not insignificant the number of people that are active in inside a Flickr. And what I would encourage folks to do is do what I did. So at one point I was like, okay, let me, let me bear down and, and get reacquainted with how Flickr works because I had fallen off the path. I was one of the early users, 2008 right of Flickr. And I remember how I used it then and not why I fell in love with it then. And where social media and image sharing kind of veered off to right or wrong is different than what [00:16:00] Flickr kinda laid out as the path and Flickr laid out this whole idea of groups and. Individuals that are communicating about a particular type of photography, sub genre of a genre, of a sub genre of photography. And there's a giant group around it that love that, and they interact with each other. So the, the community associated with that and that feedback, I feel like is part of what's missing with the, with the hashtags and the likes and all that of today. Just that. Just like I, I remember back in the day I was living in Los Angeles, I wanted to be a headshot. I wanted to start shooting headshots, and I did. So I was shooting headshots for actors and actresses down there, and as a, as a, a new guy to Flickr, I was like, okay, I have this set of, of photos that I did of this particular person. Let me just upload them all to Flickr and let the community tell me which one is best. And that's the way I used it, almost like as a, as an ai, right. Upload everything. And then [00:17:00] it, we evolved past that with like 500 PX and those kind of, Initiatives where it was only upload the best of the best and get feedback on that. So I applaud that direction. But the, the lack of community is what's I feel like missing in a ton of photography today. This is why I started up thew community because there's, the whole part of photography is just interacting with other people. It's not a sport where you can just go shoot and enjoy your, the fruits of your labor and then go on to the next thing. It is conversational and is educational. It's psychological. It's all these things that only a community can bring out. So yeah, I would encourage people to go check out if you haven't, if you still have your Flickr account, I'd go dust it off and go, go back in there and see why you fell in love with it in the first place and use it. I am not paid to say that I, I don't have to say anything about Flickr if I don't want to. That is not part of my agreement. Right. Is to talk great about Flickr or Smugmug. But the reason I signed on with, and [00:18:00] align myself with both companies is because I believe in what they're doing, and the software is amazing. So, yeah, definitely, definitely go check it out. You know, it, it doesn't cost anything, you know, so I would just go kick the tires. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: right. They, they still do have the free plan. I just so I'm on the free plan. I haven't had a pro plan in, in a long time, but I, I just pulled up my, my, my profile. I've been a member of Flickr since August, 2005. Frederick Van Johnson: Wow. Before me, before me. Right. See, and that, Scott Wyden Kivowitz: It's a long Frederick Van Johnson: yeah. And you could have canceled your account, you know, for whatever reason. You know, and, and a lot of people did, I think because of the, the Flickr was a hot potato back in the day. It was, first it was independent, and then it wasn't, it got bought by Flick or by Yahoo, and then they didn't know what to do with it. And then Yahoo. And, you know, fell on rough times and they sold that off to ver so flick Flickr off to Verizon, all these different, different things that happened. [00:19:00] Smugmug, just, just in their credit. Right? And the folks that managed Smugmug, so Smugmug, looked at Flickr and didn't, I don't think they looked at it from the standpoint of, oh we can take this thing and, you know, flip it and generate a gazillion dollars. Cuz if Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Oh yeah. Frederick Van Johnson: that, yeah, if they were thinking that they could have probably done something similar to that by funneling the gazillion Flickr members into smug mug. They didn't do that. They didn't do that. And their reasoning I'm told was they, they love photography. You know, Smugmug was one of the reason I, I wanted to be part of that company. They genuinely love photography and they saw a Flickr as part of photography history and lore and they felt, and all those Imageners and just memories that were just on the, on the event horizon, getting ready to be sucked into the black hole. So they were like, you know, Let's save it, you know, and, and, and make sure that it's gonna be around for generations and generations through infrastructure and all the things that they did when they bought [00:20:00] it. So they modernized everything, bought it, or they bought it, then modernized everything, put it on, you know, the correct servers and all that, and boom, and it's off to the races. And speaking with them, I had a, a conversation with the CEO and speaking with them. I, I said one of the fears is, yeah, it's gonna go away. You know, there's all these also brands out there. There's Instagram, there's Facebook, there's 500 px. The list goes on and on of people that are trying to get our ImagenAI's, not withstanding, Adobe and Apple and Microsoft and Google also trying to get our Imageners. Why would I put 'em on this service over here? That was a hot potato and all that. So they explained that the, without going into it exhaustively, but they explained that they have a commitment that Flickr is not going away. Flickr is gonna be be around for our kids and beyond our kids, and they've taken steps to make sure that happens. When I heard that, I was like, there's no if for that alone, it is a [00:21:00] no-brainer, right? I don't have to worry about it. Right. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: At, at imaging usa I had the, the, I was lucky enough to sit, sit in with a conversation with Ben. And, and he, he gave me the whole, the whole spiel, the whole backstory Frederick Van Johnson: Oh, Ben McCaskill. Yeah. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah. Yeah. He gave me the whole story about how the whole Flickr thing happened, and I, it just, it not only is it fascinating, but it gives me even more respect for the team at Smugmug everybody at Smugmug for putting so much care into photography and what photographers have done for history. right. So it's Frederick Van Johnson: I don't think you're gonna find, I don't think you're gonna find a company with an executive team and a founding team that are more passionate. And I would go out on a limb. I, I very rarely make definitive pointed statements like this, but knowing those folks and knowing what they're doing, what they could [00:22:00] have done. And how much money they could have made. Right? And that they, despite all that, that sort of the cash grab that was right in front of them, they, I argue that they did the right thing. You know, on the Flickr side and just on the management of the company side, the company has Smugmug, has managed to remain private through all these storms through, I mean, the photon torpedoes that have been shot at Smugmug are endless, right? I mean, from patent troll suits to, you know, infrastructure. You need to make sure that that's modern and, and humming along to advancing the platform while running photographer's, businesses and making them money, you know, and, and keeping the eye on the ball, which is the people that are customers of both of these companies. Well, all three now, including this week in photo, are passionate photographers. Right. And I'll, you know, inside baseball, one of the mission. Statements [00:23:00] for Smugmug Flickr, and now this week in photo is to make the word, and this is the quote, this is, this is on the wall, right? To make the world a better place through the power of photography. That's the mission. That's what guides everything you know, is to make the world a better place through the power of photography. My mission statement for this week in photo is and was to entertain, inspire, and educate. You know, however you wanna phrase those three things, depending on the usage, but to entertain photographers, so entertainment, inspiration and education. And I've, I've found over the years that when you mix those things together, you get magic because photography fits right, right in there with that. So, yeah. But to throw the question at you, I wanted to throw at you is you know, the company that, that you have hitched your wagon to over there, I want, I wanted to talk about that a little bit. What Imagen is working on --- Frederick Van Johnson: This could be a whole separate interview, but I wanted to just kind of go into that world of, of what Imagen's [00:24:00] working on and what your, you know, what your contribution is over there. I'm curious, you know, from a photographer standpoint, but then also from a, somebody that's in the industry that is working with companies that build great tools for photographers, what are, what are you guys working on over there? Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah. So, imagine three years ago started doing AI photo Editing, right? We learn how photographers edit in Lightroom, Classic, and create what we call a personal AI profile. And then once that's made, it takes less than 24 hours. Once it's made, we can then edit super fast. We can edit 1,500 photos in less than 10 minutes. So, and it's only getting faster and faster and better and better. We do a whole wide range of things, including subject mask, automation and cropping and straightening and, and do global, you know, global edits. We, we do so much and it's definitely been saving photographers a ton of time. Months back, we also announced, and [00:25:00] people have been testing our AI Culling, our photo selection software. We're actually like analyzing the photos and determining, not saying like, this is bad, this is good. You know, like, We're basically just saying like, these are the ones that we suggest as your keepers, but we're still giving you everything so you can still review everything to make sure that, you know, we're not overlooking something. And that's been an ongoing thing. It's, that's in beta. It's available to, to all paying customers right now. So we've had Editing, we've had culling, and what we're doing is we're basically bringing everything into what we are culling out a workspace. So, this is basically representing natural evolution of our, of our software solution. We streamlines every aspect of a photographer's post-production workflow. We've already started this process by integrating, culling into Editing so somebody can upload their photos to us [00:26:00] and have the culling done and then review that in Lightroom, review that in photo mechanic, whatever you want, and then quickly. Without re-uploading, just choose what you want to send. Off to Editing. It's painless. So we've, we've been weaving the science that we've been building into a photographer's workflow. And so we're, basically what we've got is this whole roadmap of, of post-production tasks that can be conquered in super fast lighting, speed, precision, all using AI and automation and facilitating the, the ability to get post-production work done faster and safer, secure so that's, Frederick Van Johnson: it's like, that's the, it sounds like what we, we were talking about before, right? That's what technology is for, is to take things off of your plate so that you can, the thing, presumably the thing that you love doing. Is shooting right. As a photographer, or maybe it's [00:27:00] post-processing. I don't know. You know, but for the most part, I think the common denominator for most photographers is we love taking photos. And the other, the other part of it is we love sharing those photos and everything in between that is, you know, has varying degrees of difficulty depending on, you know, where, where you find joy. But you know, what I'm curious about from, from your software standpoint is take like, who is it for? Like is it for event photographers? Is it for wedding photographers? Is it for headshot or portrait? Scott Wyden Kivowitz: So, yeah, it's Frederick Van Johnson: who, Scott Wyden Kivowitz: So we, when we, when we originally came out, we originally created the software for wedding photographers, of course. But as we've come to find, there's all sorts of photographers that are using, imagine we've got sports photographers, we've got NASCAR photographers, literally NASCAR photographers. We have you know, family portrait photographers. We have theater photographers that are using Imagine. [00:28:00] So it really a lot of headshot photographers, right? We've got the wide range boudoir, you name it. They're using Imagine. So we are built for bulk photo Editing in whatever capacity is needed. Bulk could be five photos at once. Bulk could be a million photos at once. It doesn't make a difference. We can handle as little or as much as is as needed. And it is just a matter of, right now we support Litton Classic. We have, we are working towards supporting capture one as well. Frederick Van Johnson: Awesome. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: but, but but yeah, So Frederick Van Johnson: So take me through that just real quick. I know we're, we're outta time, but I'm curious cuz I, I wanna use the software, right? So, so if I'm shooting portraits, or let's say I'm doing a, a model shoot, right? And we're, we're taking photos on this, you know, in Sacramento or whatever. I come back with my memory card. I, you know, I'm shooting Nikon. I don't have camera to cloud, so I come back. With my memory card and, you know, but at that point of ingestion is where it's gonna go on my hard drives and get replicated and [00:29:00] do all the things, and I'm gonna bring it into Lightroom Classic. So currently the, my flow would be, okay, all right, I'm gonna sit down, got my glass of wine, okay, import my photos, let's go and, and do a first pass. And basically find the photos that I feel like are worthy of me taking to the next level. I e working on cropping, you know, adjusting, removing, et cetera. And that's, that's basically where it goes. So I work on those, and then those go into a finish folder, and then I put 'em on the, you know, Smugmug and send the person a link and you know, all the things. How does imagine fit in that flow? In my flow? Like where would I plug you in? Scott Wyden Kivowitz: what you would do is you, once you import into Lightroom, right, before you even do anything else, right, to any, any reviewing of the photos before your first pass, you would you'd import into Lightroom. You would then open the Imagine app and you would upload your, that entire folder or the collection, [00:30:00] whichever you work in up to imagine and let it do the first pass for you. So what you're Frederick Van Johnson: from within Lightroom or as a separate app, so outside of Lightroom, separate app. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: separate app. Yep. But it, it, it directly reads your catalog information. And you would literally send us the folder. We would, we would upload Smart Previews if they exist. If they don't, we make our own, our own temporary Smart Previews. We upload those our culling AI will, will analyze it, give, give you back the the information. You would download it if your Lightroom preferences have XMP turned on, XPS will be made. If they don't, we'll just inject it into the database of Lightroom and they'll show up anyway, either as stars or colors. So there's, there's your first pass. You now go back to Lightroom, review the data. You can go through and make your second pass at this point. Now it's you doing it right? You're getting back involved. We're, we're letting you. Take, you know, it's your creativity. You [00:31:00] don't need to, you know, be com totally hands off. Trusting AI for all your post-production tasks --- Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Maybe one day you will trust it, but right now you don't have to. And and so you do your, your, your, your fine tuning of the call, and then you go back to the Imagine App and say, okay, I've made my changes, everything. Five Star is what I wanna edit. And now it reloads back the metadata just to see what, what was changed. Then that takes two seconds. Just this is a text file and then it goes off to Editing just the way that you would edit. And then again, in a couple minutes it'll be done. You download it back to Lightroom and you'd open up Lightroom and see them Frederick Van Johnson: Edited. Ready? So, so, so is the idea with imagine to get me to, so help me with Culling, of course. But, and you know, on the helping me with Culling, is it, does it learn over time what I like, based on what I've rejected and what I've kept and, and, and can I tweak it? So can I say like, personally I, you know, if I'm [00:32:00] shooting a model session or something, I may l favor towards. My 85 mil lens and a blurry background, and I always want the nearest eye to be tack sharp focused. Those are three main things. Can it, can it key on those? Scott Wyden Kivowitz: So right now it doesn't personalize Culling. That is something that we will get to once we are, once we are happy with the overall output for majority of our, you know, of the Imagine users, at that point, once we're happy and we take it out of beta, now we can then turn on personalization and then it'll learn from your, your needs. But we are holding off on enabling personalization till we are happy with like the general output of what it's doing for everybody. But the Editing is a hundred percent personalized, so Editing wise, it will learn. Your what? It'll learn from, from what I like to say from A to z, A being what you do in camera and Z, Z or Z being the the final edit. So it'll learn everything that you do and, and just do it [00:33:00] for you. And again, it's not to it. Yeah. It's all non-destructive in Lightroom still. So it's not, you're not, it doesn't have to be the end if you don't want to be. You can still do blemish removal and Photoshop if you want. You can still do blemish removal and Lightroom if you want, or use portraiture or whatever it is. You can still keep going to further enhance the photo for your creative needs. Frederick Van Johnson: So it sounds like what I said earlier about how I used to use Flickr back in the day as, as like a, a, a crowdsourced Culling tool to tell me what shots are great. Sounds like Imagen's doing that now, so I can. Upload my, my headshot shoot of, you know, actor ABC on the beach. I can upload all those photos. It's gonna initially go through and tell me which ones I should care about and work on based on smarts, and then apply some corrections to those selects at the end, and then present those back to me. So now I have a starting point of really great [00:34:00] Imageners that have, that are almost ready to go. Then I can go in and do some final cropping, or I want this, like this, or I wanna make this one for TikTok, whatever. So I can do all that stuff later. But it gets me to the point where all these photos are good, and all these photos are, we've edited them to make sure that they are ready for you to add your special sauce to. Right. Is that, is that accurate? Okay, Scott Wyden Kivowitz: much. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's, so the culling and Editing are two separate things. You can do one or the other, but it's part of, you could do it either separate or you could do it together. It's, it's, that's the whole thing where we're going with this sort of integrated experience. So that it's all one and it, we're not ending there. You know, we're, we're gonna be adding features to be able to send your final edit to your gallery automatically. You know, so if you're you know, hopefully at some point we're integrating the Smugmug and, and any other potential gallery solution that, that wants to integrate, we'll, we'll be able to send it off to you. But also from the ingestion side of things [00:35:00] is part of this new this direction we're going is being able to be a photographer's additional disaster recovery solution. So right now a lot of photographers are using Smugmug, for example, to back up all their JPEGs. Right? Because Smugmug makes it really easy to do so, especially from Lightroom. So we're making it easy for photographers to also back up their RAW files as they're going to upload for Culling or, and or Editing. We could back up your RAW photos for you at the same time, right? So, that's Frederick Van Johnson: and where do those go if I'm, I'm backing up my RAW titles. Where, where are they, where those files live. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: so that would go toward the Imagen servers. So we've got yeah, so we have Amazon AWS servers that, that we utilize, you know, the, the super high, high production secure servers and yeah, nobody has access to 'em. They're very safe. Just, you know, just like, just like a Flickr or a Smugmug. They're, they're in cloud servers and they're, they're secured and, you [00:36:00] know, all that stuff. So it's um, Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Smugmug has a, that I, I learned about relatively recently, a couple months ago. There's a service. That Smugmug doesn't promote a whole lot, so this might be like a, a, a hacker, insider tip, but if you look on Smugmug and you search for a, a feature called Smugmug source, it will allow you to upload your RAW Imageners and store them on Smugmug in perpetuity. Frederick Van Johnson: Right. So when I learned about that along with all this Flickr stuff, when I learned about that, I was like, wait a minute. So, so, you know, back blades. Yeah. You know, Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah. Frederick Van Johnson: so basically, yeah, they're so, I don't know that they want the word to be out there that widely, you know, but yeah, it's totally possible to throw all your raws up there and have them accessible to you and not worry about, oh, I gotta put a drbo here, or, oh, not drbo or sinology, Scott Wyden Kivowitz: thing. Frederick Van Johnson: you know? Disaster recovery is so important --- Scott Wyden Kivowitz: the thing is, is disaster [00:37:00] recovery is becoming even more important as I feel like in many cases consumer hardware is getting poorer and poorer in quality, right? Hard drives, hard drives fail. I mean, drbo went outta business. There's so many, so many risks of having your, your RAW files only in a local device and or on one cloud solution. Like, to me it's like, there was a time where, where I had Smugmug and I had Backblaze and I had Dropbox, and I have like the more, the better in, in, in my opinion, right? And then have the JPEG somewhere else, you know, so it, it's you, you can't have too many. And if they're, if they're affordable, you know, if cloud is more, in some cases for some people, cloud is more affordable and having these expensive NA drives and all these additional hardware in your, in your studio, in your [00:38:00] house. So, Frederick Van Johnson: Yeah Scott Wyden Kivowitz: I'm very excited about, about the future of, of backups in, in everything because I feel like it's, it's all headed in good directions and it's only in the photographer's benefit, Frederick Van Johnson: No, a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. For me it, you know, I'm, I'm weird, but for me, I, I feel like everything you said is a hundred percent true. You know, backups in the cloud on, you know, your servers on Smugmug where, you know, anywhere. But here basically, you know, I want them to live and I want them to be accessible. Cuz I think what a lot of photographers are solving for is, what if my house just implodes on itself and falls into a Poltergeist black hole or something. Right? Where, and all my Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Well, you're in California. It could Frederick Van Johnson: I. I, I actually live in Quest of Verde. I'm just saying No, but what was that sound? But yeah, but yeah, no, totally, totally. But yeah, but we're solving for that if something catastrophic like that happens the [00:39:00] one thing that we, well, one of the things that we are gonna be most stressed about is our photos and all that stuff. So having it offsite in the cloud makes a ton of sense. But also what I'm solving for is just being able to get stuff instantly. So, like, for me, I want local, I want everything, all my stuff local, and I want to be able to access it. And that's mainly because what if a company goes outta business? What if a company gets eat eaten by another company and that company doesn't think that part of the business is important and they shutter it? Now I gotta scramble and figure out a solution. Which is not to say that's gonna happen to any of the companies we've mentioned, but, you know, paranoid Frederick in my photos, I want local, but then I want it in the cloud too Scott Wyden Kivowitz: The Frederick Van Johnson: other areas. The Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah, the Redundancy Yeah. That's it. Frederick Van Johnson: and access and safety. Like out my friend Alex Lindsay who used to be on Twitter, you know, he is one of the founders of twi. He, he would say that [00:40:00] data doesn't exist unless it, it exists in three locations simultaneously, you know, which makes sense. So it needs to, you know, or a photo, let's say a photo needs to be on your local drive here on, like you said, on your Dropbox or maybe at a friend's house. Maybe you guys are mirroring drives and doing that dance or at grandma's or your parents or something. So there's another copy of it. And then there's a copy up there in the, in the cloud as well. So if something happens on earth and those things go away, you still have your cloud back up. Something happens to the cloud backup. You have one of those. So you got the tripod of stability, which I think is, is really, really important. I've lived by that since you said that. It just, it's made sense, you know, to kind of follow that, that rule of thumb. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: I, I, I've been using the 3 2, 1 rule, which is very basically it's the same thing. It's, but it's spelled out as basically three backups, two of which are local. One is cloud. I have been looking at it more as at least three backups. I [00:41:00] have, I do have two local, but I would say one local, at a minimum, two clouds, because again, clouds are, clouds are safer in the long run. Right. Frederick Van Johnson: Yeah. yeah, It's scarier or safer. Yeah, I, yeah, you're right. It's safer, but depending on who you are and the volume of your photography, part of the hard part could be getting your photos up there in the first place, right? So if you're, you're shooting. You know, a gazillion Imageners every weekend on weddings or whatever, and you're still trying to upload, you could never catch up, right? Because you're, you're filling the bucket faster than you can empty it, Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah. But that's the, that's the beauty of how Imagen is doing it, is we're building it into the workflow. So when you're going to upload your 6,000 photos you shot at the wedding to cull, right? Initially, we're backing up your RAW photos. At that point, Frederick Van Johnson: Beautiful. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: when you're up uploading to cull, it's backed up a again, this is not yet, this is the future. This is what's coming. And then from there you can go into edit. And again, your photos [00:42:00] are still backed up. So if something happens, you know, so let's, yeah, definitely. To wrap things up, I wanna just say from the. Workflows, podcasts, the imagine side of things. Please definitely go and check out TWIP this weekend photo. Listen to all of Frederick's episodes. Check out the website, check out the community there. And that's what this is about. This is about you know, introducing for everybody who d in on, on the Imagen side, who hasn't heard of this weekend photo to to definitely go and check it out. I've known Frederick for a long time, Frederick Van Johnson: A long time. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's been forever. Yeah. I think I had, I had more hair back when we first, Scott Wyden Kivowitz: same. Frederick Van Johnson: maybe a little bit. And you know, you know, I would, I would throw it back at, you know, you as well, you know, for the, the folks in the this week in photo listening audience that are listening and watching this. You heard what we talked about, right? [00:43:00] With how. Imagen kind of fits into the workflow of what you're doing, depending on what your genre is. Yeah. I mean, you can't not check it out, right? I mean, and one of the people behind the company Scott here, so, you know, they're, they're genuine people doing genuine things that are genuinely in service of making the world a better place through the power of photography. Right? And making your, your journey in photography a little bit easier, a little bit more pleasurable, using the tools correctly. Ai, using AI tools correctly to help you be better at what you're doing, like in the case of Grammarly. I talked about in the beginning of the conversation how Grammarly has helped me become a better writer because it's low key showing me what I'm doing wrong, repetitively, so that I'm fixing it, you know, as I go along. Same thing with what you guys are doing. I see parallels there, like, oh, okay. And I'm always overexposing cuz it's always needed to, it's always pulling my exposure back a little [00:44:00] bit. Maybe I should work on that. You know, so those sorts of things. So I would, I would, I would say partner, don't vilify ai, you know, and the technologies that, that the various tangents that AI is comprised of, don't vilify it. Now is the time to be educated about it, whether or not you're, you're gonna dive in and become a, you know, a proponent of the technologies and all this stuff, but dive in and understand how this stuff works and how people are using it. On the f on the other, on the, the bullish side. Figure out how AI can make you a better photographer using software like Imagen, using, you know, the different tools that are available, available to you, figure out what it is you wanna be as a photographer, and how these new technologies can now kickstart what you're trying to do. These are texts that, that, that Ansel Adams didn't have Right. Yet. He still managed to make great photos. Right. And now you have all these cool things, whether it's the cameras, it's the software, it's the community, [00:45:00] and all these things. Nikon's anti-AI ad campaign --- Frederick Van Johnson: So yeah, use them and don't be afraid of them. The, the, I saw the, and I don't know if you saw this ad campaign that Nikon put out, and I'm an Nikon shooter, so I'm, I'm pro Nikon, right. So they put out this campaign on basically the gist of the campaign was don't give up on reality yet. Right. Because everyone's doing this mid journey stuff and yada, you know, all these cool things. And Nikon put out this, basically it was an ad campaign that showed. And I'll find out, I'll put it in the, the TWI blog post as well. But they've, they, the, the commercial that they put together, the piece was showing real locations, fantastical locations around the planet that Nikon photographers had captured, and then they prompted them. So they wrote a prompt that you would've written to generate that kind of image. But of course, it was a real image, right? So I thought that was good. That was an interesting take on it. But at the end of [00:46:00] it, they had a screen up that had, you know how they put the text on the screen and they had a text, they had a text on the screen that said this campaign inspired hundreds of photographers to go out and shoot in reality, or something like that. And the first thing I thought was only hundreds. Right? Only hundreds of photographers for one. I mean, you know, you look at Mid Journey and Adobe and all these different companies that are springing up, millions and millions of millions of people are trying these things. So hundreds is a drop in the bucket. So, I wouldn't have leaned into that if I were you, Nikon. And on the other side of it, I was thinking, why are you, why are you raging against the machine? Literally, right. Why not? Why not change the, the, the narrative of the conversation to be something like, look at what these amazing Nikon photographers are doing with their amazing Imageners that they shot with their Nikon cameras and then, you know, used AI to do [00:47:00] these things with, right. So kind of leaning into it instead of trying to vilify it. I think vilifying the, the AI tech right now where there's generative or large language models or whatever is a losing battle. It's like trying to stuff the toothpaste back in the tube. It's not going, so you might as well just brush your teeth. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: so. I'm also a Nikon user and I still love my Nikons and I always will. But did you notice that after that campaign came out that a lot of the photos were sourced from Flickr Frederick Van Johnson: I, Scott Wyden Kivowitz: for the campaign? Frederick Van Johnson: I did not see that. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah, so, so it was a, it was a, it was a very clever campaign. I was like loving it as I watched the video and then I saw the news about how it was literally like, some of it was just, was even creative commons, like unpaid, so I Frederick Van Johnson: oh, that's, that's so sad. You know, that's interesting. [00:48:00] That's the thing about Flickr and one of the powers that people kind of overlook, that Nikon inadvertently leveraged. Right? And that's the fact that the metadata for the photos that you upload, if you choose it to be, but by default, the metadata for your photos, the, the focal length, the lens you use, the camera body, you use, the sh the exposure information, et cetera, et cetera, is all recorded. And, and displayed beautifully with your photo and searchable. So like Nikon did, you could say, you know what, I wanna see what, what is the world shooting? You know, what are people shooting with with Nikon Z nine s? You know, with the 50, you know, with the 50 50 mil lens, Nikon Z nine s, you know, what, what are they doing in San Francisco? Photographers shooting Nikon Z nine s in San Francisco last Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Creative Commons available for commercial use. Frederick Van Johnson: that's creative column that I can use in my thing, right? So, boom, there you go. So it's, it's all there. So like [00:49:00] the Flickr platform. And Smugmug are, are, are built, it sounds cliche but I'm gonna say it anyway, by photographers, for photographers and those, those are the things that photographers want, right? You want to, I see a beautiful picture that I would like to try and do something like that instantly. I wanna know what you shot it with. You know, not so much the camera body, but what lens and exposure and all that other stuff. So I think one of the things Flickr may consider, I don't know if they're considering it now, but I know when I, around, when I first joined the company, they had Flickr, had spun up a whole new category to allow people that were generating video game photography to upload and categorize. So like in software, like, or games like horizon Zero Dawn, right? So Beautiful Game, open World Game has a feature in there where you could just wander around and. Pull out a virtual camera and take a photo of the scene. [00:50:00] Turns out that's your photo. That is now your photo. So you can take that photo and upload it to Flickr as your photo and it'll be categorized appropriately. So I'm thinking, you know, AI is probably next, right? To have something up there that, that, you know, we can flag it as if it's not already there. It may already be there, they're fast. But, you know, something that you can, you can search for all the photos that were generated by AI or even a particular AI algorithm. Like, oh, this is from Open ai or, you know, not open ai, but Dolly. Yeah. This is from Dolly, this is from Mid Journey, this is Firefly, whatever. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: It's, it's only a matter of time. It's gotta, it's gotta go that direction for sure. But, um, awesome. Well, let's, let's wrap things up. Thank you, Frederick. This has been, this has been fantastic. I can't wait to get this episode out, Frederick Van Johnson: We will do this again. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Yeah. This, this, we'll have to, we'll have to talk about this as we edit the episode, but this might have to be a two-parter cuz this, this is a long one, Frederick Van Johnson: [00:51:00] Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, on TWIP it'll be a one parter cuz I'm going longer with the episodes. You know, little news is, so I, the, the way trip is gonna evolve over the next couple of weeks is, you remember back in the day I was, twi was essentially round table discussions with multiple photographers in the room discussing a particular topic. So going back to that, which is inherently longer form, right? So we're gonna move to that. But then also the one-on-one interviews will continue. So we'll have those on the, on the feed as well. And now I'm adding on, on the short form side, the YouTube channel will start evolving into more. Small tidbits of information, whether it be a review of a particular piece of software like yours or some piece of kit, like some, you know, a new lens or some new bobble for the camera that came out. So we'll do short form product reviews, maybe 15, 20 minutes or so, we'll start going up on the YouTube channel. So all that stuff is kind of represents the, the next [00:52:00] evolution. Ofw kind of regressing in one area, going back to the round table and pressing forward in another area, kind of embracing YouTube. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: diverse set of, of of shows of like parts of the show. I think it's great where I'm planning the similar things. Not what you're doing, but like similar segments type of things for, for workflows as well. Oh, that's I'm gonna be the next one that's gonna be coming hopefully soon, shortly after this episode airs is what we're culling workflows mentors, where we're gonna have one-on-one conversation with a mentee and a mentor talking about whatever they're struggling with. Frederick Van Johnson: that. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Uhhuh, you're, you're not allowed to steal that from me. Frederick Van Johnson: Oh, Chat, g p t give me words that are similar to mentors that I Oh man. That's Scott Wyden Kivowitz: this has been a, that's been a, a long, long thing in the works, but I can't wait till it's finally like out there, out there for Frederick Van Johnson: No, it's so much to Scott Wyden Kivowitz: enjoy because if one person have a problem [00:53:00] Yeah. So, yeah. Love this has been fantastic. I, I'm, I can't wait for this episode to air on, on our, my side. On your side. It's gonna be great. Hopefully we can do more of these in the future. Hopefully people enjoy this, this crossover type of thing, and we can make it, make it happen more. Frederick Van Johnson: the Absolutely. I'm down, man. Yeah. Just say the word and I'm there. This is, this was a, this was a good time and yeah. And folks, if, if you want to. Connect with me, obviously I'm at this week in photo.com is the, is the podcast and all the good things. Hundreds like said. I was saying hundreds and hundreds of episodes up there with you know, a ton of people from the industry. All corners of the industry are up there. So if you feel like listening to conversations similar to this, you know about various topics, just head over to this weekend, photo.com for that. But then also on the, if you're a pro photographer, definitely check out Smugmug, which is my sister company. I can't say enough about how meticulous they are about caring for photographers, ImagenAI's [00:54:00] and empowering photographers to, if they want to generate income from their photography, helping them do that. And then on the Flickr side, you know, all the things we talked about. Yeah, I mean, just, just the metadata piece. You owe it to yourself just to go over there, even if you don't sign up. To poke around and explore and see what people are doing with your particular camera and lens to get inspired. Like, oh crap, I didn't know I could do that. You know, and then go out and shoot. So yeah, check it, check it all out. Lots of stuff to look at. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Awesome, awesome. Yeah, for on the Imagen side if, if you are looking for somebody software that is going to help you with your post-production to speed things up, let you get back to, you know, going out and traveling and going out and spending time with family which is on. And what I'm about to do when we stop recording and do you know, whatever it is you wanna do or do, work on all the things in your business, then check out. Imagen it's just imagen-ai.Com. You'll find the podcast there and, and all the other stuff. And again, you can try, imagine for free. You don't need [00:55:00] to pay us to try us. So, yeah. So this has been fantastic. I am, I am. We're gonna, let's let, I'm just gonna hit stop. Here we Frederick Van Johnson: Yeah. Yep. Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Frederick, this was amazing. Thank you so much for this incredible conversation. I can't wait to do more crossover episodes with you. with, with you and TWIP community. It's, it's been, it's been real. So awesome. This is so good.