I’ll start with a bold statement: I consider deciding to use AI editing the best decision I made for my photography business. Updated in 2026 to include the newest info! 

My History with Imagen: Talent Profiles v. Personal Profiles

In October of 2023 I took the leap into AI editing. I had tried Imagen AI before, but honestly didn’t have the best luck. Since they give new users 1,000 free edits, I had no reason not to try it. So I started using a couple of their Talent AI Profies, but I just didn’t love the result. I chose a couple profiles that looked closest to my style, but ended up re-editing them because they just didn’t pop like I wanted them to. Thankfully with the free edits I didn’t lose anything by trying, but I wasn’t very interested in it. 

In all fairness, I’m kind of a control freak about my images, and I’ve never wanted to outsource it before. I’m a rare photographer who kind of enjoyed the editing process (notice the past tense of “enjoyed”). I like the creative aspects of it, and I didn’t feel like I could trust anyone to put the care into it that I do … plus, I wasn’t willing to pay to outsource it, especially since my previous outsourcing attempts just didn’t work well.

In Atlanta we have a great community of photographers, and in one of my Facebook groups a couple of my photographer friends were talking about how much they LOVED AI editing. After I told them my experience with it, they encouraged me to try making my own personal profile. I was intimidated by it because it required uploading a minimum of 3,000 consistently edited photos in a variety of locations, lighting situations, skin tones, seasons, and more. 3,000?!? How much freakin’ time is that going to take?? I pictured myself having to slog through thousands of individual images to painstakingly choose examples of my style. 

But once I started, I discovered it wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t have to search for individual images. All I had to do was find Lightroom catalogs from a variety of shoots. I picked a few recent weddings, including an outdoor wedding, a ballroom wedding, an industrial setting, and a bunch of portrait sessions ranging from outdoors to studios to people’s homes. Once I started looking for variety, it was pretty easy to choose. And with an average wedding ending up at 1,000+ photos I found that that 3,000 image threshold was pretty easy to reach, and in fact had more than I needed before I knew it.

The Results

I was immediately happy with the results I got from my initial profile. I felt like it did a great job of adjusting exposure, contrast, tone curves, clarity texture, and vignettes. I could look a the adjustments it had made for any image and find something very consistent with what I’d do myself.

Fine Tuning

While I was initially happy with the edits, they weren’t perfect. I found that it had issues with editing dark skin tones in particular. But thankfully, Imagen continues to learn from its mistakes. If you need to adjust the edits in Lightroom, just go ahead and make the edits, and when you’re done, you can upload the final edits so it can continue learning.

One note though, it doesn’t learn immediately. You need to hit another threshold of images before it can re-adjust your profile. I’m currently 3,725 images away from my next fine-tuning opportunity.

My Editing Process

I think it’s helpful for me to go over my editing workflow to show how AI editing fits in. I work in 3 phases: 

1. Culling. I go through the images to select the images I want to edit. I “edit in” by flagging the images I want to use. I used to “edit out”, meaning I’d remove or hide the images I didn’t want to edit, but when I did it that way I found that I ended up wasting time editing more images that would ultimately end up getting deleted because they were duplicates or slightly out of focus, etc. 

2. Editing. I go through every image I’ve flagged and adjust the settings. I have a couple go-to presets I’ve created myself that set the exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, clarity, tone curve, vibrance, saturation, sharpening, and noise reduction. But the presets only get you part of the way, so each image will still get manual corrections, mostly to exposure, temperature and tint, searching for the right skin tones. I will also crop each image, which usually also involves straightening. It is by far the most time consuming part of the process. This step is where Imagen AI does all the heavy lifting. Before I had AI editing, I would take a break at the end of this step and work on other things, putting the images aside for a day or more so that I could come to step 3 with fresh eyes. 

3. The final edit/cut. After taking some time away from the images, I’d come back to them and look at them in grid view. That way I can see the images all together and compare the color, often re-editing entire series of photos. I do this because sometimes when you look at the images individually they may start to trend toward being a little too warm or too cold, it might not be as obvious when you look at them individually but once you see them together those fine adjustments will become clear. 

This is a screenshot from a typical project. After I flag the images I want, I open Imagen, and I make sure that under Filters I choose only the flagged photos to edit. I typically select Straighten, and sometimes Smooth Skin (more on those later). I love that you can see how many photos you’ve chosen to edit, and can see how much you’ll pay for this edit. You do have options to filter based on star rating or label, in case your culling method is different than using flags.

What Imagen AI Does Well

It speeds up the process. Imagen AI is fantastic at taking over Step 2 of my editing process. Not only does it do the most time consuming part of the process, it also eliminates the need for me to take time away from the images so I can view them fresh. Now I can turn around some shoots by the next day, instead of 1-2 weeks. I can get through a wedding in under a week, if not sooner (depending on my workload). 

Great skin tones. I know this depends on your editing style, but the manual, time consuming task of fine-tuning skin tones can be so tedious. I find that it’s as good or better than my own editing in getting great skin tones all the time (after that first round of fine tuning my profile). 

Straightening. This is an absolute Godsend. Even though I use a grid in the view in my camera, I can’t seem to consistently shoot perfectly straight. Manually straightening is a huge time-suck, and I don’t personally think the auto Upright mode in Lightroom does a good job consistently. But the straightening in Imagen is flawless. This feature alone has changed my life. 

Skin Smoothing. As I write this, this feature is still in beta, so it’s free. The results I’ve seen have been really good so far, and I’m sure it will get even better. It does a great job of natural skin smoothing without looking overdone. You can also adjust the skin smoothing settings, to change the amount of texture, clarity and sharpness.

What I Don’t Use Imagen AI For

Culling. I’ve only tried this a couple times, and the Culling feature is still in beta at the time I’m writing this. I just found I couldn’t trust its decisions yet. Honestly, I’m not sure that I’ll ever really trust AI to be the judge of which image in a series has the “best” expression. I’m sure it’s better at detecting the sharpness of the subject, or if someone is blinking, but when it comes to expressions in particular, I just couldn’t figure out why it was choosing one image over another. I also think that culling is an artistic decision, and there are images that I love that might well not be chosen by AI. 

Cropping. I’ve used the cropping feature a couple times, and didn’t love it. I like the idea of it, but when I used it it would just crop in most images a little bit. It’s not quite smart enough yet to use things like the rule of thirds to evaluate how to crop an image to make it more impactful. Especially since it adds $.01 to each image’s cost, it just wasn’t worth it yet. 

Black and White Conversion. I generally select which images to make black and white. Sometimes I use black and white on images with great emotion, to avoid the distractions of color. I’ll also give options for some images in color or black and white. But choosing which images should be in color or black and white is something AI isn’t ready to do yet, and might never be. It’s a decision that needs to be made by the artist.

Pricing

In my opinion, $0.05 per image (with straightening, it comes to $0.06) is absolutely, positively worth it. That being said, I overpaid for it for the first few months, since I’m on a pay-as-you-go plan. I wasn’t ready to make a commitment to a monthly plan, not knwing how much I’d use it or which plan I should be on. I knew I’d blow through the 18k plan quickly, so I’d need one of the top tier plans, and I wasn’t ready to commit to $127 a month. I also didn’t think I’d use it all the time. I figured I’d do it to get through some of my bigger shoots and still do a lot manually. Well, I wrong, with a capital W.R.O.N.G. Once I started using it I fell in love and straight up couldn’t live without it anymore. Before I knew it I had spent $450/month in my busy season of October/November. I’ve only used it since October (I’m writing this in January) and I spent $900 instead of $250-ish so far because I wasn’t paying attention to the idea of switching to an annual plan. So my recommendation is that as soon as you know you’ll use it, get on the annual plan, especially if it’s during a busy season!

New in 2026: Now Imagen offers a Limitless plan. The limitless plan includes all retouching and AI tools I was previously paying for at about $.01 per image. I’ve been so happy since I switched to the new plan and I don’t have to worry about additional costs for edits like skin smoothing and teeth whitening. 

The Bottom Line

Here it is: Starting to use Imagen AI is absolutely the best decision I made for my business in 2023. It’s MY style, MY edits, fast, and for a reasonable price. It has literally changed my life. So if you’re on the fence, give it a try. You have 1,500 free edits to see how it works for you. 

Click here to check out Imagen AI 

Full disclosure: the link above is my referral link, which means I get credits for each person that signs up using my link.