As a professional photographer, my workflow is everything. The time I spend behind the camera is the creative part, but the hours spent in front of a computer culling and editing can be a real grind. Finding the right tools to streamline that post-production process is not just a luxury; it’s a necessity for running a profitable business and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Over the years, I’ve seen many solutions come and go, but the rise of AI-powered editing assistants has truly changed the game. Two of the biggest names in this space right now are Aftershoot and Imagen. Both promise to save you countless hours, but they go about it in different ways.

This article is for working photographers who are serious about optimizing their workflow. We’re going to dive deep into what makes each of these platforms tick. We’ll look at their core features, how they integrate with software you already use like Adobe Lightroom Classic, and what kind of results you can realistically expect. This isn’t just about speed; it’s about accuracy, consistency, and finding a tool that feels like a natural extension of your own creative style. We will explore everything from AI-powered culling to personalized editing profiles to help you decide which platform is the right partner for your photography business.

Key Takeaways

  • Core Functionality: Imagen offers an all-in-one ecosystem for culling, editing, and cloud storage, functioning as a comprehensive post-production assistant. Aftershoot focuses primarily on AI-powered culling and editing, with a workflow designed to select and edit your best images quickly.
  • AI Editing Approach: Imagen’s standout feature is its Personal AI Profile, which learns your specific editing style from thousands of your own edited photos. It also offers Talent AI Profiles from world-renowned photographers. Aftershoot uses AI to create a personalized editing profile based on your past work, which you can then apply to new galleries.
  • Workflow Integration: Both platforms integrate with Adobe Lightroom Classic. Imagen is a desktop application that uses the cloud for processing, allowing you to continue working while it edits. Aftershoot also functions as a desktop app that analyzes your photos and applies edits within your existing workflow.
  • Culling Technology: Both tools offer advanced AI culling to identify blurry shots, closed eyes, and duplicates. Imagen’s culling provides options to review previews with your AI Profile already applied, creating a more seamless transition from culling to editing. Aftershoot is well-regarded for its fast and accurate culling capabilities, allowing for quick selection of your best shots.
  • Control and Customization: Imagen gives you a high degree of control through Profile Adjustments, allowing you to tweak the AI’s behavior on a granular level and Fine-Tune your profile over time with new edits. Aftershoot also allows for adjustments to its AI-generated edits, ensuring the final images match your vision.

Understanding the Modern Photographer’s Workflow Challenge

Before we get into the specifics of each platform, let’s set the stage. If you’re a wedding, portrait, or event photographer, you know the drill. You come home from a shoot with thousands of images. The first hurdle is culling, the process of sorting through all those photos to find the keepers. This used to mean hours of clicking through images, comparing similar shots, and making tough decisions. It’s tedious, eye-straining work.

Once you have your final selection, the editing begins. For a consistent gallery, every single photo needs adjustments. We’re talking about color correction, exposure, contrast, and maintaining a consistent style that your clients hired you for. This is where presets have been a lifesaver for years, but even with presets, you often have to make individual tweaks to each photo to account for different lighting conditions. A preset that works perfectly for a sunny outdoor shot might look terrible on an indoor photo from the reception. This is the problem that AI editing aims to solve: applying your unique style intelligently and consistently across an entire shoot, no matter the lighting.

Both Imagen and Aftershoot were born out of this need to reduce the time spent on these repetitive, time-consuming tasks. They are designed to let you get back to the parts of your job you love, like shooting, interacting with clients, and growing your business.

Imagen: Your Personalized AI Editing Assistant

Imagen positions itself as a complete post-production solution. It’s not just an editor; it’s a workflow assistant that handles culling, editing, and even cloud storage. The philosophy behind Imagen is to create an AI that learns to edit exactly like you, becoming a true digital assistant that understands your unique aesthetic.

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It’s a desktop app that you install on your computer, and it works directly with your Adobe Lightroom Classic catalogs. The heavy lifting of the AI processing happens in the cloud, which is a huge plus. This means your computer isn’t bogged down while Imagen is working. You can send a gallery off to be edited and keep using your machine for other tasks without any performance issues.

Core Features of Imagen

Imagen’s feature set is built around the idea of creating a seamless workflow from start to finish. Let’s break down the key components.

Personal AI Profile: The Heart of Imagen

This is, without a doubt, Imagen’s signature feature. A Personal AI Profile is an AI model of your unique editing style. To create it, you need to provide Imagen with at least 3,000 of your previously edited photos from a Lightroom Classic catalog. The more photos you provide, and the more varied the lighting conditions, the smarter your profile becomes.

The process is straightforward. You point Imagen to your edited catalogs, and it analyzes every adjustment you’ve ever made. It learns how you handle exposure, white balance, contrast, HSL sliders, and more. It understands how you edit in bright sun, in shade, indoors with artificial light, and during golden hour.

Once your profile is built (which usually takes less than 24 hours), you can apply it to new, unedited galleries. The magic here is that it’s not just applying a static preset. It analyzes each individual photo and applies your style in a way that is appropriate for that specific image. The result is a gallery where every photo looks like you edited it yourself, but it’s done in a fraction of the time. On average, Imagen edits a photo in under half a second. A gallery of 1,000 photos can be back to you, ready for review, in minutes.

Lite Personal AI Profile

What if you don’t have 3,000 edited photos? Maybe you’re a newer photographer, or you’ve recently changed your style. For this, Imagen offers the Lite Personal AI Profile. Instead of a large catalog, you provide a Lightroom preset and answer a short survey about your editing preferences. The Lite Profile then intelligently applies your preset, handling the basic corrections like exposure and white balance on a per-image basis. As you use your Lite Profile and make tweaks to the edits, you can feed those final edits back into Imagen to Fine-Tune it over time, making it smarter and more accurate with every shoot.

Talent AI Profiles

If you want to try out a new style or don’t have a consistent editing portfolio to build your own profile, Imagen has you covered with Talent AI Profiles. These are Personal AI Profiles created by some of the most respected photographers in the industry. You can browse through different styles, from light and airy to dark and moody, and apply them to your own work. This is a fantastic way to experiment with new looks or to get professional-grade edits right out of the box. You can even use a Talent Profile as a starting point and then use the Profile Adjustments feature to tweak it to better fit your taste.

AI Culling: Smart and Integrated

Culling is often the most dreaded part of the post-production process. Imagen’s AI Culling is designed to mimic how a human photographer would select the best images. It automatically groups similar photos, flags them for things like closed eyes, blurriness, or poor focus, and gives each photo a star rating.

One of the standout features of Imagen’s culling is the ability to Cull with Edited Previews. This means you can see the culled photos with your chosen AI Profile already applied. This is a game-changer because it allows you to make your selections based on how the final, edited photo will look. It helps you visualize the final gallery and tell a more cohesive story. Once you’ve made your final selections in the Culling Studio, you can send the keepers directly to be edited, creating a smooth, uninterrupted workflow all within a single app.

Additional AI Tools

Beyond the core color and tone editing, Imagen offers a suite of additional AI tools that you can add to your editing workflow for an additional fee per photo. These are tools for tasks that are often tedious to do manually on a large batch of photos.

  • Crop: The AI analyzes the composition of your photo and applies an intelligent crop.
  • Straighten: Automatically straightens horizons.
  • Subject Mask: Applies a mask to the main subject of your photo, allowing for targeted adjustments. This is incredibly useful for making your subjects pop.
  • Smooth Skin: Applies subtle and natural-looking skin smoothing.
  • Background Mask: The opposite of Subject Mask, this tool allows you to edit the background independently of your subject.

These tools are optional, but they can save a significant amount of extra time, especially for portrait and wedding photographers.

My Experience with the Imagen Workflow

Using Imagen feels like handing off your work to a trusted assistant. The process starts by creating a new project in the Imagen desktop app. You point it to your Lightroom Classic catalog and select the photos you want to edit. Then, you choose which AI Profile to use (your Personal Profile or a Talent Profile) and select any additional AI tools you need.

Once you hit “upload,” Imagen gets to work. You’ll see a progress bar, but as I mentioned, you can just go about your day. When the edits are ready, you get a notification. Clicking “download” applies all the AI edits directly to your photos within your Lightroom Classic catalog. All the adjustments appear on the sliders in the Develop module, just as if you had moved them yourself.

This is a crucial point: the edits are non-destructive. You have full control to make any final tweaks you see fit. If a photo is a little too warm or needs a bit more contrast, you can easily adjust it. Once you’re happy with the final gallery, you can use the Upload Final Edits feature. This sends your tweaked edits back to Imagen to help Fine-Tune your Personal AI Profile, making it even more accurate for the next shoot. This continuous learning process is what makes Imagen so powerful. Your AI assistant grows and evolves with you as an artist.

Aftershoot: The Culling and Editing Specialist

Aftershoot has built a strong reputation in the photography community, initially gaining a lot of praise for its incredibly fast and accurate AI culling. Like Imagen, it aims to drastically reduce your post-production time, allowing you to focus on more creative and profitable tasks. Aftershoot also operates as a desktop app that integrates into your existing workflow.

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The platform is divided into two main products: Aftershoot Cull and Aftershoot Edit. While you can use them together for a streamlined process, they can also function independently, which offers some flexibility depending on your specific needs.

Core Features of Aftershoot

Aftershoot is designed for speed and efficiency. Let’s look at what it offers.

Aftershoot Cull

This is where Aftershoot first made its name. The culling process is designed to be as fast as possible. You point the software to a folder of your photos, and its AI gets to work analyzing them. It identifies duplicates, blurry images, and closed eyes. It then presents you with a selection of the best images.

The interface is clean and user-friendly, making the review process quick and straightforward. It highlights the “keeper” images and provides different views for you to compare similar shots side-by-side. You can easily override the AI’s suggestions, ensuring you always have the final say. Once you’ve finalized your selections, Aftershoot can import those selects directly into Lightroom or Capture One, ready for editing.

Aftershoot Edit

Aftershoot’s editing functionality also works by learning from your past edits. You create an AI Profile by feeding it a catalog of your previously edited images. The AI analyzes your style and creates a profile that you can then apply to new photos.

Once your profile is created, you can run your culled images through Aftershoot Edit. The software applies your learned style to each photo, adjusting for different lighting conditions. The goal is to deliver a consistently edited gallery that reflects your personal aesthetic. After the AI has done its work, you receive the edited photos back in your catalog, where you can make any final adjustments.

The Aftershoot Workflow

The typical workflow with Aftershoot involves two main steps. First, you run your images through Aftershoot Cull. You import your entire shoot, let the AI make its selections, you review and approve those selections, and then you have your curated gallery of keepers.

From there, you would take those selected images and run them through Aftershoot Edit. You apply your personalized AI editing profile, and the software batch-edits the entire selection. The edits are then applied to your files, and you can open them in Lightroom or your editor of choice to perform any final touch-ups before exporting for your client.

The process is designed to be a linear path from a full memory card to a client-ready gallery, with AI assisting at the two most time-consuming stages.

How to Choose the Right AI Tool for Your Business

So, both platforms offer powerful AI features to speed up your workflow. How do you decide which one is right for you? It’s not about which one is “better” in a vacuum, but which one is a better fit for your specific needs, style, and way of working. Here are some criteria to consider.

Criteria for Choosing an AI Photo Editor

  1. Editing Accuracy and Style Replication: How well does the AI learn and replicate your unique style? This is the most critical factor. The goal is to get edits that are 90-95% of the way there, requiring only minor tweaks.
  2. Workflow Integration: How seamlessly does the tool fit into your current process? Does it feel intuitive, or does it force you to change how you work in a way that feels unnatural?
  3. Speed and Efficiency: How much time does it actually save you? Consider both the processing time and the time it takes you to set up projects and review the results.
  4. Culling Effectiveness: How good is the AI at selecting the best images? A good culling tool should save you time without making you worry that it’s discarding hidden gems.
  5. Control and Customization: How much control do you have over the final output? Can you easily tweak the AI’s suggestions and help it learn from your changes?
  6. Cost: What is the pricing model, and does it make sense for your business volume? Most of these tools charge per photo, so you need to factor that into your cost of doing business.

A General Guide to Making Your Decision

  • If you value a deeply personalized and evolving editing style… Imagen’s Personal AI Profile and its Fine-Tuning feature are hard to beat. The continuous learning aspect means the AI gets better and more attuned to your style over time. If you see your editing style as something that is constantly evolving, this is a huge advantage.
  • If your primary bottleneck is culling… Both tools offer excellent culling, but Aftershoot built its reputation on this feature. It’s known for being extremely fast and accurate. However, Imagen’s feature of culling with edited previews is a powerful tool for visualizing the final gallery.
  • If you want an all-in-one solution… Imagen offers culling, editing, and cloud storage all within one subscription and one application. This integrated ecosystem can simplify your workflow by keeping everything under one roof.
  • If you want to experiment with different looks… Imagen’s Talent AI Profiles are a fantastic resource for trying out new styles from top-tier photographers without having to build a profile from scratch.

My best advice is to take advantage of the free trials that both companies offer. There is no substitute for running a few of your own shoots through each platform to see how they perform. Pay attention not just to the quality of the results, but to how each tool feels to use. The right tool should feel like a partner, not another piece of software you have to fight with.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some common questions I get from other photographers about these AI tools.

1. Is AI editing going to replace photographers? Absolutely not. These tools are assistants, not artists. They handle the repetitive, technical tasks, which frees you up to focus on the creative aspects of your work: shooting, connecting with clients, and defining your artistic vision. You are still the creative director.

2. Can I trust the AI to not miss a great photo during culling? The AI is very good, but it’s not perfect. That’s why both platforms have a review step. You should always do a quick scan of the AI’s selections to make sure there isn’t a quirky, emotional, or “imperfect” photo that the AI might have missed but that you know your client will love. You always have the final say.

3. Do I need a powerful computer to run Imagen or Aftershoot? Since both are desktop apps, you’ll need a reasonably modern computer. However, a major benefit of Imagen is that the most intensive AI processing is done in the cloud. This means it has less of an impact on your computer’s performance compared to a tool that does all the processing locally.

4. How many photos do I really need to build a good Personal AI Profile in Imagen? Imagen requires a minimum of 3,000 photos, but for the best results, more is better. A collection of 5,000+ photos from a variety of lighting situations (day, night, indoor, outdoor, flash, natural light) will create a very robust and versatile profile.

5. What happens if I change my editing style? This is where Imagen’s Fine-Tuning feature really shines. As you start editing with a new style, you can keep uploading your final edits to your existing profile. Over time, the profile will adapt and learn your new preferences. Or, you can create an entirely new Personal AI Profile dedicated to your new style.

6. Can these tools edit in black and white? Yes. With Imagen, you would create a separate Personal AI Profile specifically for your black and white edits. You would train it using only your black and white edited photos.

7. Is the per-photo cost worth it? You have to do the math for your own business. Calculate how many hours you currently spend on culling and editing per month. Determine what your hourly rate is (or what you could be earning in that time). For most professional photographers, the time saved far outweighs the per-photo cost, making it a very profitable investment.

8. What kind of support do these companies offer? Both Imagen and Aftershoot have support teams and extensive online help centers with tutorials and guides. The photography community is also a great resource, with many user groups on social media where you can ask questions and share tips.

9. Can I use these tools with Capture One? Aftershoot offers support for Capture One. Imagen’s primary integration is with the Adobe ecosystem, specifically Lightroom Classic.

10. What are “Talent AI Profiles” in Imagen? They are AI profiles created by well-known professional photographers. Instead of building your own profile from scratch, you can use one of theirs to achieve their signature look on your photos. It’s like a super-powered preset that intelligently adapts to each of your photos.

11. What is Imagen’s Cloud Storage? It’s an integrated backup solution. When you upload a project for culling or editing through a Lightroom Classic catalog, Imagen can also back up your high-resolution RAW files to the cloud. This provides an extra layer of security for your work.

12. Does Aftershoot have something like Talent Profiles? Aftershoot’s model is focused on creating a personalized AI profile based on your own work. While they don’t have a marketplace of profiles from other photographers in the same way Imagen does, they do offer tools to help you get started and refine your own look.

13. Which one is better for a beginner photographer? For a beginner who may not have a large portfolio of consistently edited work, Imagen’s Lite Personal AI Profile (built from a preset) and the Talent AI Profiles offer a fantastic starting point. They allow you to get professional-quality, consistent edits right away while you develop your own style.

Final Thoughts

Both Aftershoot and Imagen are powerful allies in the battle against post-production burnout. They represent a significant leap forward from traditional presets and batch processing. The choice between them comes down to your priorities.

Aftershoot offers a fast, focused solution for culling and editing, and it has earned a loyal following for its efficiency.

Imagen provides a more integrated ecosystem that covers culling, editing, and cloud storage, with a powerful emphasis on creating a Personal AI Profile that learns and evolves with you over time. For me, the ability to Fine-Tune my profile and the option to use Talent AI Profiles gives Imagen a slight edge in versatility and long-term partnership potential. The feeling that my AI is continuously getting smarter and more aligned with my artistic vision is incredibly powerful.

Ultimately, the best tool is the one that you will actually use and that seamlessly integrates into your business. I encourage you to try both, run your own photos through them, and see which one empowers you to spend less time editing and more time creating.