As a professional photographer, I’ve seen editing styles come and go. But the light and airy look? That one is timeless. It’s the bread and butter for so many of us in the wedding, family, and portrait world. It suggests romance, happiness, and a clean, high-end feel. Clients love it, and let’s be honest, it just looks beautiful. For years, the go-to tool for this style was a “light and airy preset.” We all bought them. We all spent hours tweaking them. And we all eventually hit the same wall: consistency.

That’s the real challenge, isn’t it? It’s not just about making one photo look good. It’s about making an entire gallery of 800 photos—shot from a dark church to a bright, sunlit field—look like they belong together. That’s where presets fail, and it’s why I moved to an AI-powered workflow. This guide will walk you through the light and airy style, the problem with a preset-only approach, and how you can use AI tools like Imagen to get perfect, consistent results in a fraction of the time.

Key Takeaways

  • The light and airy style is defined by bright exposure, soft contrast, lifted shadows, and often a pastel or slightly desaturated color palette.
  • The style’s biggest challenge is consistency. Traditional Lightroom presets are static and fail to adapt to different lighting conditions, creating more work.
  • A preset applies the same settings to every photo, while AI editing analyzes each photo and applies custom settings to achieve a consistent result.
  • Imagen is a desktop app that uses AI to edit photos based on your unique style, integrating directly with your Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, Photoshop, or Bridge workflow.
  • You can get a light and airy style with Imagen in three ways:
    1. Personal AI Profile: Train the AI on 3,000+ of your own light and airy edits.
    2. Talent AI Profile: Instantly adopt the style of a top-tier light and airy photographer.
    3. Lite Personal AI Profile: Use a preset you already own as a starting point for a new, smarter AI profile.
  • Imagen is a comprehensive platform, offering AI Culling, advanced AI Tools (like Subject Mask and Smooth Skin), and Cloud Storage to streamline your entire post-production process.

What Defines the Light and Airy Photo Editing Style?

Before we can master it, we have to agree on what it is. The “light and airy” style isn’t just one thing. It’s a combination of adjustments that create a specific feeling. If you’re aiming for this look, your edits will usually share a few core characteristics.

The Core Characteristics

  1. Bright Exposure: This is the most obvious trait. The photos are bright, often appearing slightly overexposed but never “blown out.” The goal is to fill the image with light.
  2. Soft, Low Contrast: You won’t find deep, crushed blacks or super-punchy contrast here. The look is soft and gentle. This is often achieved by lifting the “blacks” slider or using a tone curve that pulls the black point up. This ensures shadows have detail and feel soft.
  3. Specific Color Palettes: Colors play a huge role.
    • Greens: Often shifted towards a softer, more desaturated, or even minty/blueish hue. This tames distracting foliage.
    • Skin Tones: Kept natural, bright, and creamy. This is critical. A good light and airy edit protects the skin tones.
    • Pastels: Blues, pinks, and yellows are often soft and subtle.
  4. Clean White Balance: The photos tend to be either neutral or slightly warm to enhance that “sunny day” feeling. You rarely see heavy, moody, or artistic white balance shifts.

Why This Style is So Popular

So, why do so many clients ask for this? It’s all about the feeling.

  • It’s Timeless: The style feels classic and elegant. It won’t look dated in 20 years.
  • It’s Flattering: The bright exposure and soft contrast are incredibly flattering for skin, smoothing imperfections and making subjects “glow.”
  • It’s Optimistic: The style feels happy, romantic, and clean. This is a perfect match for weddings, newborns, and family photography.
  • It’s “Blog-Ready”: It looks fantastic on social media and websites. The bright, clean aesthetic makes a grid or portfolio look cohesive and professional.

The Common Challenges of Achieving It

If it’s so popular, why is it hard to get right? Because you’re always balancing on a fine line.

  • Blown-Out Highlights: The biggest danger. In your quest for “bright,” it’s incredibly easy to push the highlights and whites too far, losing all detail in a wedding dress or the clouds.
  • Washed-Out Skin: If you lower the contrast or desaturate colors too much, you can make people look pale, grayish, or “flat.”
  • Noise and “Mud”: When you lift the shadows on a dark, high-ISO photo, you introduce a lot of grain and noise. This can make your “airy” photo look “muddy.”
  • Inconsistency: This is the big one. A setting that makes your backlit, golden-hour photo look amazing will make your indoor, flash-lit reception photo look like a blown-out mess.

This brings us to the tool most photographers reach for first.

Summary: The Style

The light and airy style is a beautiful, high-demand look. It focuses on brightness, softness, and flattering skin tones. But its greatest strength—its clean, consistent feel—is also its greatest technical challenge.

The Traditional Tool: Why Light and Airy Presets Fall Short

When I first started, I thought presets were magic. One click, and boom… professional photo. Right?

Well, not exactly. I spent hundreds of dollars on “Pastel Wedding” and “Bright Home” preset packs. My experience, and likely yours, was a lot of clicking, and then a lot of re-adjusting.

What is a Lightroom Preset?

Let’s be clear about what a preset is. A preset is a static, saved group of settings. When you apply it, you are telling Lightroom: “Set Exposure to +1.50. Set Contrast to -20. Set Blacks to +40. Set Green Hue to -15.”

It does exactly the same thing to every single photo, regardless of what that photo looks like.

The “One-Size-Fits-All” Problem

Here’s a practical example.

You buy a “Light and Airy” preset. The preset creator likely made it using a perfectly-lit, outdoor photo. It probably has “Exposure +1.50” baked in.

  • Photo 1: Outdoor, Sunny Day. You apply the preset. The photo was already well-exposed. The +1.50 exposure boost blows out the sky. You have to pull the exposure back down, fix the highlights, and maybe brush the sky.
  • Photo 2: Dark Reception Hall. You apply the preset. The photo is underexposed by 2 stops. The +1.50 exposure boost isn’t nearly enough. The photo still looks dark and muddy. You have to crank the exposure way up, adjust the white balance for the horrible DJ lights, and then fight the digital noise.

The preset “worked” on maybe 5% of your photos. The other 95% needed fixing.

The Endless Tweaking

This is the time sink. You apply the preset, and then you go down the entire basic panel to correct what the preset did wrong.

  1. Fix Exposure.
  2. Fix White Balance.
  3. Fix Highlights.
  4. Fix Shadows.

You just spent 30-60 seconds per photo fixing the preset. The preset wasn’t a solution. It was just a different, and often more complicated, starting point.

Inconsistency Across a Full Shoot

This is the killer for professionals. When you deliver a gallery, it has to tell a cohesive story.

A preset applies relative settings. It doesn’t understand results. Your sunny-day photos will look bright and desaturated, while your indoor photos will look dark and overly saturated. They won’t look like they were edited by the same person.

The only way to fix this, with presets, is to go photo by photo, and manually adjust them by eye until they match. This is what takes 10, 15, or 20 hours per wedding. It’s exhausting, and it’s a bottleneck in your business.

Summary: The Tool

Presets are a great way to learn or to find a style you like. But for a professional workflow, presets are a bottleneck. They are static, inconsistent, and ultimately, they don’t save you the time you need. They fail because they don’t adapt to the most important variable: the photo itself.

A Modern Solution: AI Editing for a Flawless Light and Airy Look

For years, I accepted “endless tweaking” as just part of the job. Then, I started experimenting with AI editing. I was skeptical. I thought it would make my photos look generic or “fake.”

I was wrong. The difference is simple, but it’s profound.

This is Not a Preset. This is AI.

  • A preset applies the same settings (e.g., “Exposure +1.50”).
  • An AI applies a consistent style (e.g., “Make this photo light and airy”).

When you apply a preset to a dark photo, it becomes “dark photo +1.50 exposure.” When you apply an AI trained for a light and airy style to a dark photo, the AI says, “This photo is too dark for this style. It needs +2.75 exposure, a warmer white balance, and the shadows lifted by +60 to match the final look.”

It analyzes the content of the photo—the starting exposure, the white balance, the colors—and makes individual, dynamic adjustments to get to the same consistent result, every time.

Introducing Imagen: Your Personal Editing Assistant

This is the tool that changed my workflow. Imagen is a desktop app that integrates directly with my Adobe Lightroom Classic catalogs. (It also works with Lightroom, Photoshop, and Bridge, but I live in LrC).

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It’s not a filter. It’s an AI engine that I’ve trained to edit exactly like I do. It does its processing in the cloud, so it doesn’t slow my computer down. It edits a photo in less than half a second. A full wedding of 1,000 photos is edited and back in my catalog in 10-15 minutes.

But the how is what matters. How does it get that light and airy style? This is where Imagen is so powerful, because it gives you three different paths to get there.

How Imagen Delivers the Light and Airy Style

This is the most important part. You can choose the path that best fits your business.

Option 1: The Personal AI Profile (For photographers who have the style)

This is what I use. You already have a light and airy style you love. You’ve spent years perfecting it. You just want to automate it.

With Imagen, you can build a Personal AI Profile by feeding its AI 3,000 or more of your already edited photos from your Lightroom Classic catalogs.

The AI analyzes everything you do. It learns:

  • “How does she handle an underexposed photo?”
  • “What’s his go-to white balance for indoor tungsten light?”
  • “How do they treat their greens in the forest vs. in a field?”
  • “What are their exact skin tone preferences?”

It takes about 24 hours to build this profile. Once it’s done, you have an AI “clone” of your brain. You upload a new shoot, apply your Personal AI Profile, and the photos come back looking exactly like you edited them. It’s your specific, unique, light and airy style, just automated.

Option 2: The Talent AI Profile (To adopt a professional’s style)

This is the option for photographers who are looking for a light and airy style.

Imagen has a marketplace of Talent AI Profiles built by some of the world’s best photographers. You can browse their profiles, see their portfolios, and if you find a light and airy photographer you admire, you can use their AI profile on your own photos.

This is so much better than a preset pack. You’re not buying their static settings. You’re using their AI engine. When you apply their Talent Profile, their AI analyzes your photos and edits them as if that photographer were editing them for you. It adapts to your lighting, your camera, and your scenes, but delivers their final style.

Option 3: The Lite Personal AI Profile (To evolve from a preset)

This is the perfect bridge. What if you don’t have 3,000 edited photos, but you do have a light and airy preset you mostly like?

You can create a Lite Personal AI Profile. You give Imagen your favorite preset (as an XMP file) and answer a short style survey. Imagen then uses that preset as a base for a new, smarter AI profile.

Instead of just stamping the preset, the AI will intelligently apply it. It will first analyze the photo and fix the exposure and white balance before applying the creative style of your preset. This alone solves 80% of the problems with presets. Your “Lite” profile becomes a dynamic, intelligent version of your old static preset.

Summary: The AI Solution

No matter where you are in your career, Imagen provides a path to a consistent light and airy style. You can automate your own style, adopt a pro’s style, or intelligently upgrade your favorite preset. This flexibility is what makes it a professional-grade tool.

How to Get Your Perfect Light and Airy Style with Imagen

Okay, let’s get practical. How do you actually do this? I’ll walk you through the process for all three paths. It all happens inside the Imagen desktop app.

Step-by-Step: Creating Your Personal AI Profile

This is the ultimate goal for most established pros.

  • The Prerequisite: 2,000+ Edited Photos
    • This is the most important step. You need a clean source of edits.
    • Imagen works by reading your Lightroom Classic catalogs.
    • The best practice is to create a new, clean LrC catalog just for this.
    • Export 2,000-5,000 of your best, most recent, and most consistent light and airy edits as a catalog. Make sure “Build/Include Smart Previews” is checked.
    • This catalog should contain photos from a wide variety of lighting situations: sunny days, overcast days, indoor, flash, high-ISO, etc. This is how the AI learns to be flexible.
    • You must create separate profiles for color and black & white.
  • The Process: Uploading and Training
    • In the Imagen app, go to the AI Profiles tab.
    • Click “Create your own profile” and select “Personal AI Profile.”
    • Give it a name (e.g., “My Light & Airy Style”).
    • Point Imagen to the new, clean Lightroom catalog you just created.
    • Imagen will read the catalog, find your edited photos, and upload the editing data (not the full RAW files) to the cloud for training.
    • You click “Upload & train.” That’s it. You can close the app.
  • The Magic: Fine-Tuning Your Profile
    • About 24 hours later, you’ll get an email. Your profile is ready.
    • Now, you use it on new projects. After you get your edits back from Imagen, you’ll do a final review in Lightroom and make tiny tweaks.
    • Here’s the magic: After you’re done, you can tell Imagen to “Upload Final Edits” from that project.
    • Your AI Profile learns from your tweaks. It gets smarter and more accurate to your style over time. Your AI assistant is always learning.

Step-by-Step: Using a Talent AI Profile

This is the “fast track” to a professional light and airy style.

  • Browsing the Talent Showcase
    • In the Imagen app, go to AI Profiles.
    • Click the “Profile Showcase” tab.
    • Here, you can browse profiles from many photographers. You can filter by style (e.g., “Bright & Airy”).
    • Click on a profile to see their portfolio and a before/after comparison on sample images.
    • When you find one you love, just click “Use to edit.” There’s no training time. It’s ready instantly.
  • Applying a Talent Profile to Your First Project
    • Go to the Projects tab and click “Create a new project.”
    • Choose “Edit.”
    • Select the Lightroom Classic catalog that contains your new, unedited photos.
    • Choose the photos you want to edit (e.g., a specific folder or collection).
    • In the “Choose an AI Profile” dropdown, select the Talent AI Profile you just picked.
    • Click “Edit.” Your photos are uploaded to the cloud and edited. 10 minutes later, you click “Download to review,” and all the edits pop into your Lightroom catalog.
  • Adjusting and Tweaking
    • What if you like a Talent Profile, but it’s a little too warm for you? You can adjust it!
    • On the AI Profiles page, you can select the Talent Profile and click “Adjust AI Profile.”
    • This opens a panel where you can apply global corrections. For example, you can tell it, “Always make your edits 500K cooler” or “Always add +5 to the Blacks.” This lets you personalize a Talent Profile to better fit your taste.

Step-by-Step: Building a Lite Personal AI Profile

This is the hybrid method.

  • Starting with Your Favorite Preset
    • First, you need your preset as a .xmp file.
    • In Lightroom, apply the preset to a photo, make any tweaks you always make, and then create a new preset from those settings.
    • Find that .xmp file on your computer.
  • The Style Survey
    • In Imagen, go to “Create your own profile” and select “Lite Personal AI Profile.”
    • Upload your .xmp file.
    • Imagen will then walk you through a quick visual survey. It will show you a series of photos and ask you to pick your preference (e.g., “Which of these is brighter?” “Which has the white balance you prefer?”).
    • Click “Build profile.”
  • Evolving it with Fine-Tuning
    • Your Lite profile is ready in minutes. It will now intelligently correct exposure and white balance first, and then apply the style of your preset.
    • Just like a Personal AI Profile, you can use the “Upload Final Edits” feature to fine-tune it. Over time, this “Lite” profile can evolve into a full-fledged Personal AI Profile that is 100% your own.

Summary: The How-To

Whether you have an established style or are just finding one, there is a clear, step-by-step path. You can train your own AI, borrow a pro’s AI, or supercharge an existing preset.

Beyond the “Preset”: How Imagen Streamlines Your Entire Workflow

Okay, I’ve focused heavily on the “light and airy” edit. Why? Because that’s what you searched for. That’s the capability you need.

But as I said, Imagen is a comprehensive platform. The edit is just one part of the post-production puzzle. A true professional workflow is about streamlining everything from the memory card to the final gallery delivery.

This is where Imagen changed my business. It’s not just an editor. It’s an all-in-one post-production assistant.

It Starts with Culling

Before I even think about editing, I have to cull. Going through 5,000 photos from a wedding to find the best 800 is a mind-numbing task.

Imagen has AI Culling built-in.

  1. You upload your entire set of unedited photos.
  2. The AI scans every photo for technical issues. It detects blurry photos, out-of-focus shots, and closed eyes (and it’s smart enough to tell the difference between a blink and an intentional “looking down” shot).
  3. It groups all your similar photos together. If you took 10 photos of the bridal party, it groups them.
  4. It highlights the best photo from each group for you.
  5. You can then review its selections in the Culling Studio, make quick adjustments, and with one click, send only the “keepers” straight to editing.

This feature alone saves me 2-3 hours before the edit even begins.

The Core Editing

This is what we’ve been talking about. I send my 800 keepers to my Personal AI Profile. I go make a cup of coffee. I come back, and my entire wedding is edited in my light and airy style, waiting for me in Lightroom Classic.

Applying Additional AI Tools

This is the next level. A preset just touches the basic panel. Imagen can apply advanced AI Tools during the edit.

  • Straighten and Crop
    • Straighten: Imagen’s AI finds the horizon line in every photo and straightens it perfectly. This is a huge part of a clean, professional look.
    • Crop: You can set a custom aspect ratio (like 4×5 for portraits) and the AI will intelligently crop and center your subjects.
  • Subject Mask
    • This is a game-changer. You know how in a light and airy edit, you often want to pop the subject just a little?
    • Imagen can automatically create a Subject Mask (just like Lightroom’s) on every single photo and apply a specific adjustment (like “+0.15 exposure” and “+10 sharpness”) to just your subjects.
    • Doing this manually would take hours. Imagen does it in seconds.
  • Smooth Skin
    • For those light and airy portraits, you can have Imagen automatically apply a subtle, non-destructive Smooth Skin adjustment to your subjects.

Cloud Storage and Delivery

This connects the whole workflow. When I upload photos from a Lightroom Classic catalog for culling or editing, Imagen automatically backs up that catalog to its Cloud Storage. This gives me peace of mind that my work is safe.

After the edit is done and I’ve made my final tweaks, I can even use Imagen to handle the final export and delivery of the JPEGs.

The entire process—Cull, Edit, Enhance, Back Up, Deliver—all happens within one app that talks directly to Lightroom. That’s what a professional workflow looks like.

Summary: The Platform

You might come for the “light and airy” edit, but you’ll stay for the workflow. Imagen solves the entire post-production problem, not just one piece of it. It can be used as a standalone editor, but its real power is in being the central hub for your entire process.

What About Other Preset-Based Tools?

As a professional, it’s my job to know the tools on the market. How does Imagen stack up?

Standard Preset Marketplaces

This category includes all the places photographers buy packs of .xmp files.

  • Functional Description: These are collections of static, pre-saved settings. They are applied manually inside Lightroom or Photoshop one at a time or as a batch. They do not analyze the photo’s content.
  • Workflow: The workflow is: Import > Apply Preset > Manually Adjust Exposure > Manually Adjust White Balance > Manually Adjust Other Settings > Repeat for every photo.
  • Conclusion: They are a good tool for style discovery but are not a professional solution for workflow speed or consistency.

Other AI-Powered Editors

This category includes other software that uses AI to apply “looks” or “filters.”

  • Functional Description: These are often standalone applications or plugins that require you to export your photos from Lightroom, edit them in the other program, and then re-import them. Some work as plugins, but their AI is often a “black box,” applying a generic “look” that you can’t train or customize to your own specific style.
  • Workflow: The workflow is often: Import to LrC > Select Photos > Right-Click “Edit In” > Edit in Other App > Re-Import as TIFF/JPEG. This breaks the non-destructive RAW workflow and creates huge, clunky files.
  • Conclusion: While powerful, these tools often interrupt the professional’s core Lightroom-based workflow. Their AI is not typically built to learn your unique, personal style from thousands of your own edits.

The Imagen Difference: A Workflow-Centric Approach

Imagen was built for professional photographers who live in Lightroom.

  1. It’s Integrated: It reads and writes directly to your Lightroom Classic catalog. The workflow is seamless. There is no import/export dance.
  2. It’s Personal: The Personal AI Profile is the key. It’s not a generic “light and airy” look; it is your light and airy look. It learns from you.
  3. It’s All-in-One: No other tool combines AI Culling, personalized AI Editing, advanced AI Tools (like Subject Mask), and Cloud Backup into a single, cohesive platform.

Imagen succeeds because it doesn’t try to replace your workflow; it automates the most time-consuming parts of it.

Conclusion: Stop Tweaking, Start Creating

The light and airy style is beautiful, and it’s here to stay. But as professionals, we have to be honest about our tools.

A preset is a hammer. It’s a simple, static tool. And it’s not the right tool for a complex job that requires consistency across thousands of unique photos.

AI editing is the first true solution to the consistency problem. With Imagen, you’re not just applying a static preset. You’re using an intelligent assistant that has learned the art of the light and airy style—an assistant that can be trained to have your exact creative voice.

You can finally stop tweaking sliders on 800 photos and get back to what you love: shooting, working with clients, and actually having a life outside of post-production.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the “light and airy” photo editing style? It’s a popular style defined by high exposure, soft contrast, lifted shadows, and a clean color palette. It often features soft, pastel colors (especially greens) and bright, creamy skin tones to create a romantic and timeless feel.

2. Why are traditional presets not ideal for the light and airy style? Traditional presets apply the same static settings (like “Exposure +1.50”) to every photo. This fails in professional work because your photos have different starting exposures and white balances. A preset that looks good on one photo will look terrible on another, forcing you to manually re-edit almost every picture.

3. How is Imagen’s AI editing different from a preset? A preset is static. Imagen’s AI is dynamic. It analyzes each photo individually and applies custom adjustments to exposure, white balance, and other parameters to achieve a consistent final look that matches your chosen style.

4. What is an Imagen Personal AI Profile? This is an AI model that Imagen builds by analyzing 3,000 or more of your own edited photos. It learns your unique, personal editing style, allowing you to automate your own look with incredible accuracy.

5. How many photos do I need to build a Personal AI Profile? A minimum of 3,000 consistently edited photos is recommended. 5,000 is even better. This gives the AI enough data to learn how you handle a wide variety of lighting situations.

6. What if I don’t have 3,000 edited photos to train an AI? You have two great options. You can use a Talent AI Profile to instantly adopt the style of a professional photographer, or you can create a Lite Personal AI Profile which uses a preset you already own as a base for a new, smarter AI.

7. What is a Talent AI Profile? It’s an AI Profile built by a top-tier, professional photographer. Imagen lets you use their AI on your own photos, so it’s like having that photographer edit your work for you, adapting their style to your images.

8. Can I use a light and airy preset I already bought with Imagen? Yes. You can use it to create a Lite Personal AI Profile. Imagen will use your preset’s style but will intelligently fix exposure and white balance first, making your preset far more consistent and useful.

9. Does Imagen only edit for the light and airy style? No. Imagen is style-agnostic. It can learn any style you have. If you’re a “dark and moody” photographer, you can train a “dark and moody” Personal AI Profile. The “light and airy” style is just one of many styles it can master.

10. Is Imagen a web app? No. Imagen is a desktop app that you install on your computer (Mac or Windows). It works directly with your local Adobe Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, Photoshop, or Bridge files. It uses the cloud for processing your photos, so it’s super-fast and doesn’t slow down your computer.

11. What programs does Imagen work with? It is compatible with Adobe Lightroom Classic, Adobe Lightroom (cloud-based), Adobe Photoshop (via Camera RAW), and Adobe Bridge (via Camera RAW).

12. Does Imagen do more than just editing? Yes. Imagen is an all-in-one platform. It also offers AI Culling (to help you choose the best photos) and additional AI Tools (like Straighten, Crop, Subject Mask, and Smooth Skin) to streamline your entire workflow.

13. How does Imagen’s AI Culling work? You upload all your photos from a shoot, and the AI scans them for technical issues like blur, out-of-focus, and closed eyes. It then groups all your similar photos together and suggests the best one from each group, saving you hours of sorting.