Agentic Photo Editing Is Here: Meet Imagen's Intelligent Studio

At Imagen, we’re builders. In 2021, we changed how photographers edit with Personal AI Profiles. Now we’re taking the next step.

For as long as photo editing software has existed, the workflow has followed the same fixed order: cull the shoot, edit, export to finish somewhere else, and start over if anything changes. That order was never designed around photographers. It was a limit of the tools. Today, the technology finally exists to break it, so we built the next evolution of Imagen.

We’re rolling out the beta of Imagen’s Intelligent Studio gradually. It’s the first version of where we’re taking Imagen, not the finished picture, and we’ll keep building and refining it with photographers every step of the way. It isn’t a new product or a separate app. It’s still Imagen, evolved. Once you’re eligible, you’ll be prompted with a download link to upgrade your Imagen app to the new experience.

Work in whatever order works for you

Culling and editing now live in the same place, so they no longer need to happen in a fixed sequence. You don’t have to choose between a culling project and an editing project, or set up a nested project to get both. Every project does both.

Cull, then edit, then go back for another culling pass. Pull out just the photos from one moment and edit only those. All of this happens without exporting to Lightroom and back in again.

Prefer to cull by hand? Choose Skip AI culling when you set up your project, and cull manually whenever you’re ready.

A professional editor, built right into Imagen

For the first time, manual editing lives directly inside Imagen. The editor launches in Beta as a capable early release, with quality as the guiding principle, so not every AI tool is inside it yet. It supports RAW and JPEG files and includes core manual panels such as basic adjustments, curves, HSL and color grading, plus crop and straighten.

Best-in-class Editor lets you see every adjustment, fine-tune each photo, and perfect the final look without switching tools.

Your manual controls work right alongside the edits your AI Profile already made. Save your favorite settings as presets, and branch off a photo with Versions to try a new look without touching the original.

If you know Lightroom, you’ll feel at home. The keyboard shortcuts and layout are deliberately familiar, so the learning curve is short. And there’s more on the way as the beta grows, including masks, so you can edit just one area of a photo, like a face or the sky, and the ability to apply a different AI Profile to just the photos you select.

Start reviewing sooner

Today, you wait for an entire album to finish before you can see anything. In the new experience, your edits arrive in batches as they’re ready, so you can start reviewing and tweaking while the rest of the shoot is still processing. Our culling and editing models have also gotten faster.

Start reviewing and fine-tuning your AI-edited photos as they roll in, while the rest keep processing.

Just tell Imagen what you need

Imagen now has an Assistant that lets you use natural language to find and edit your photos. One request can search, select, and adjust all at once, with no digging through menus and no repeating the same steps across a gallery. A few things you can ask:

“Show me all photos of the bride.”

“Set all the keepers and standalones to 5 stars.”

“Denoise all images with ISO above 2000.”

“Black-and-white version of the ceremony only.”

“How many keepers do I have, broken down by scene?”

Just say the word. Describe what you want to find or change, and Imagen turns your direction into action across your project.

Alongside the Assistant, smart filters help you narrow a full gallery in a click, surfacing out-of-focus shots, closed eyes, and more, without any manual tagging.

Looking for something specific? AI filters help you find it faster by understanding what’s in your photos.

You stay in the driver’s seat throughout. The Assistant is there to support your vision, not replace it.

Pay for the photos you export

For Pay-as-you-go photographers, pricing is now based on export. Until now, you paid the moment you applied an AI tool, before you’d even seen the result. Now you see every edit in the gallery before you export, and you pay when the work is ready to leave Imagen. Sliders, crops, and masks you do yourself are always free.

Lightroom is still part of your workflow, if you want it

Lightroom is part of your Imagen ecosystem, and it stays fully supported. You can take a project from original files to final export inside Imagen, or keep finishing in Lightroom Classic, Bridge, Photoshop, or Camera Raw just as you do today. Both are great ways to work. If you’re finishing in Adobe, wait until your project finishes processing, then download your edits as XMP, just like before.

One thing to know: your AI Profile and AI tools edits carry over to Lightroom. Manual adjustments, ratings, flags, and color labels you make in Imagen stay in Imagen. If you’re finishing in Adobe, the simplest path is to review your edits without making manual adjustments, then download once every photo is processed.

How the rollout works

We want to build this with our photographer community, not just ship it at you. So starting September 29, the beta will roll out gradually over the next several weeks, and we’ll keep improving it based on your feedback along the way.

There’s nothing to sign up for. Once you’re eligible, you’ll be prompted with a download link to upgrade to the new experience.

What’s new in Imagen: Everything above comes together in Imagen, now an intelligent, agentic Studio for professional photographers where you cull, edit, review and export in one project, in any order you like. Use AI culling or skip it and cull by hand for free, lean on the assistant to find and act on photos when you ask in plain language, and keep Lightroom Classic in the mix if you want it. The beta is rolling out gradually.

This is just the start

What arrives in this first release is the foundation, not the finish line. We have a lot on the roadmap, including an experience that becomes even more personal over time: Imagen learning from how you edit inside the app itself, and eventually picking up on the habits you repeat so it can offer to handle them for you.

Photography has always been about your eye, your style, and your judgment. The Intelligent Studio is built to protect that and give you more freedom to work your way. We can’t wait for you to try it.