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Hey, it’s Jay P. Morgan here. Today on The Slanted Lens we’re going to take a look at AI culling and editing. You know, it’s an area that I think saves people a lot of time. It’s a great application for AI because I think it can do a lot of the work that is just a kind of a mundane type of process. I think with the right algorithms, with the right kinds of criteria, you can get a really good culling from a group of images and then an editing that’s going to get you very, very close. 
So it’s doing a lot of that work you’re trying to send out somewhere else or that you have to spend hours doing yourself. It makes weddings, portraits, those kinds of things very tedious, well anything. I mean, we’ll shoot sometimes, commercial images, and shoot 3 or 4 thousand images. So to have an AI program that will cull and edit your images makes a lot of sense. 
So we spent a lot of time in Aftershoot and in Imagen. This is sponsored by Aftershoot, but we’re going to give you really our impressions on which one of these applications does what and you’ll make a decision which one is best for you.
All right, let’s get some of the basics out of the way so we understand exactly how these two programs function and it’s going to help you understand the comparison a lot better. First off, both these programs work in PC and in Mac, I mean obviously.It is interesting that Aftershoot was kind of the first one to do culling. It’s very strong in the culling category. Whereas Imagen was the first one to kind of do editing within the program. So those two kind of came at this from those two different directions. They’ve now kind of caught up with each other and they both are doing both culling and editing. The editing process for this is done in the program but to see the results of it you have to go into Lightroom or Capture One. So you may edit in the program but it doesn’t allow you to see the results in the program. So each of these you have to go back out into Lightroom, look at the editing process and just see exactly how your images look, see what profile you’ve added, see what that profile looks like. 
Now culling wise though, these programs are, you can look at in the actual program. So if you’re in Aftershoot you go in, you can see the stacks of images. The way they’ve been stacked you can see the way they’ve been rated. You’ll be able to do all that work in the culling process in Aftershoot. Imagen is a little younger at that culling process and I don’t think it’s as robust. I think Aftershoot really gives you a strong, it gives you nice stacks. It’s easy to look at those stacks. You see face recognition so you can see all the faces, so if I do a group of people you can see exactly how the people, you know, each face and you can look for the face that’s not good. It gives you the best image and you can find maybe one face you want to replace. So Aftershoot is way ahead when it comes to culling. For me, as I’ve used both of them, I find it much easier to look at. In Imagen I can also look at the culling in the program but it gives me a small kind of line of images and you can kind of sort through those, open it up and sort through them. I don’t find it as easy to look at as the stacks that I see in Aftershoot. Aftershoot gives me nice stacks with large images. It does a really good job of finding the ones without, you know, the eyes are closed, those kinds of things and throws those out. Whereas I think Imagen has got a lot of those in as the different ratings. But it gives you your number ones, which gives you a good look at the number ones. And I just, I find the image, the ability to look at the images is much easier and quicker in Aftershoot. And the facial recognition allows me to see what faces are good. If you’re doing a large group it is superior there as well.
So let’s talk about culling. This is the area that I’ve been the most excited about because I hate sorting through images. You know, I don’t want to look for people’s eyes being closed. I don’t want to look for… I just, a program that will do that work for me is really, really beneficial. So in Aftershoot you open this up. You bring your images into Aftershoot, create a project and you started culling.You can create the criteria, you know, whether a portrait, a boudoir shot, a wedding. And then you can go in and say I want a large group, small groups and it goes through and it’s going to look for things that are similar. It’s going to give you several different categories. So I’m going to start culling. I’m going to create a new album. I’m going to add a folder and I don’t have to have a Lightroom catalog. I can add this folder which I’ve already done and bring it in again and I see all the images I shot here. So now I’m going to start my culling. 
You can do AI automated culling or you can do your AI assisted culling. So it’s not going to cull as much in the AI assisted. You’re going to have to get in and do more of the work. I love the a AI auto culling because the automated culling just gives me a lot of options. So if I choose this as a portrait, head shot and I’m going standard, I’m going to just, I’m not going to make this, I can make this fewer, like so few there’s just a really tight number of groups. I can make it so there’s big groups. It’s entirely up to me. 
I’m going to do standard, customized AI culling this allows me to change some of the things that I have here with regards to, “Do I want to look for blurry images?” “Do I want to look for eyes closed?” I can turn those on or off. 
It gives me those options. And then I can start my culling. If you look right here, these are our categories we ended up with in the culling. And it stacks your images. I do love this when it stacks your images. 
I get a stack here of seven, so when I click on this, first off it recognizes a key face. Here’s my key face. And here are my seven images. It said out of these seven images this, it thinks, is the best one. Now I can go through and look at them. I mean, I can say, okay I can look at each one of these and I can make a decision. After you look at this for a while you start going, you know what, it’s doing a pretty good job and I’m happy with the number one image that it chose. Now there’s all kinds of shortcuts here. I can hit an S key and turn this one into the key one. 
I can change these all around as I go through. But what it’s done for me, it has taken my thousand images and it’s culled it down to about 350 or around 350 images. But it gives me groups that I can look at, sort through and make sure I like the decisions that were made. 
And then from there I can change which is the best image. Or I can just simply go with its suggestion. One thing I do love about this, I’m going to go back here to home and I’m going to open up one that I did of my family. 
When you’ve got a group of people it gives you all the key faces over here. So it’s saying out of this group right here there are three images that it thinks are really good. So we see down here are three images, there’s four images, sorry. So we have four images. 
Out of that four images it says that this one right here is my best one, right there. But now I see every face. I can quickly, I can just go through really quick. Oh look, great, look, great look, great, look, great, look, great, look, great, oh, not my favorite. So I can say, all right, maybe my next one’s going to be better. 
Yeah, that little guy’s doing the same thing in the second one. And let’s see here. We got a better shot of little guy. And yeah, doing much better. So I can now choose really quickly. Okay this image I’m going to use as my main image. I’m going to pull a face from that one. Or I can say, I love the first one. First one is it. I’m going to go with that. I love the image and we just go with that. 
I did one of these in Aftershoot of a group of people, like 60 people, and it was really easy to find the best images that had the most faces that are correct and then I can quickly find a better face for two or three people. And those two can be composited and we’re off and running. So I love that about this that we have the face recognition there. And it tells you up in the corner how many you have for each stack. 
Like there’s three additional to this one. So we have four total images, four total faces. So that’s Aftershoot’s process for doing the culling and stacking and allowing you to make decisions. Now obviously you have the complete ability to change the criteria, make it more strict, less strict.
We just got the BenQ 4K HDR monitor. This is the third BenQ monitor that we have. We have absolutely loved them. They are excellent for what we do because they are color accurate. 
They allow us to use our color software to be able to keep them accurate. More importantly, they’re made for photographers and videographers. 
So it’s really, they’re color consistent. They give us color accuracy. And it just makes it really easy and seamless for us to both video edit and to do photo editing. The photo view has an anti-reflection surface that makes it really easy to work on fine details. It’s Calman verified and Pantone validated. (I’d like to be validated by Pantone.) 
The high resolution monitor gives you really crisp visuals. It’s going to cover like 99% of the Adobe RGB and DCI P3 space, which is really fabulous. You get great color accuracy across the entire monitor. It also supports high dynamic range with HDR10 and HLB compatibility. 
You can rotate the screen 90°. So you work in portrait mode or landscape mode. And it just adjusts the height, the tilt, the swivel. You can get it exactly where you need it to. We love our BenQ and we think you’re going to love it too.
So when you’re culling in Imagen you can either bring in a Lightroom catalog which you’ll cull in or you can bring in a folder of images that you cull in Imagen. I’m going to go in, I’m going to create a new project. I’m going to cull if I say it’s a portrait. I have my Lightroom catalogs here. I can come on down here and just choose a catalog. And when I choose a catalog, this is not a portrait, it’s the Milky Way, but we’re going to choose it anyway. So I choose the Milky Way. 
Now I can look at my culling preferences. The way I set this up is four is for keepers, three is for duplicates and two is for standalones. And what that means is keepers are the best of the group and the duplicates are duplicates of the best of the group. 
So they’re similar kind of like the groupings we had in Aftershoot. And then we have standalone. These are just images that don’t relate to any other images and you kind of got to sort through them on your own and figure out which ones you like. I’m going to say similar. So we’re going to group them in similar, kind of. It’s going to decide between similar images and we’re going to export it as a Lightroom catalog.
So now when I click on my catalog, I’m going to click on this one that says Laws of Light, I’ve got five images there. And now I can upload. And what this is going to do is it’s going to go through this culling process. So with imagen I can cull on the computer.So here’s a batch that I culled on the computer. I’m going to review this culling. I brought it in. I have the same criteria, number fours are my best images. And it stacks them here. So in this stacking process you see the small little image it gives me. It shows me all the images that are stacked underneath each stack. So in this case I have one here that says I have six and there’s the six images below it. So now if I want to see the six images I’ve got to go in and I can’t look at them here. I’ve got to open them up. 
So here’s a stack of 17. If I want to look at these individually I’ve got a double click on it, which takes me to this view that has the large image with the small thumbnails underneath. And here’s my 17 images. They’re all down here. If I want to see them I’m going to have to go through it, each one of them. There’s my number one image that it shows number four. Very nice, eyes are open, really pretty with the dress. But now if I want to go through and look at each one of the, each of the others, I can just go through here like this and I can see the other 17 images that it has chosen. 
So it is a little bit more of a process having to come in to this mode and go through the individual images to be able to see what we have. But that’s how you view the different ones in the stack. Now I can stay with my stack, I can go back to my single image view up here and I can go through and see my images. So if I want to, up here I can get rid of my twos, I can get rid of my threes, I can just keep my fours, fours and fives. 
So now my stacks got much smaller, you know, rather than having a stack of, you know, 17, I now have 11. My number four is here. So I have a group of three here. So rather than having, you know, four 11 or 17 to go through I just have the three to look through. So that first one’s a number three. Eyes are closed, not good. That number four is not bad. And I can go through and I can make changes. 
So if I choose this number three and I go, yeah I love that, I can go ahead and change this to a four if I want. It wouldn’t be when I would because your eyes are closed. But you have the ability to change the rating. So that’s how you go through and refine your culling here in Imagen.
So even though Imagen has made some great progress with regards to their culling process, I think Aftershoot is a much superior program when it comes to culling. I just like the way it stacks. It gives me the ability to see the images right there on the side. 
I don’t have to jump down and try to open them up. It’s just much faster for me to see. I absolutely love the face recognition and it shows me the faces. 
So if I’m doing a group of six or eight people and I have a really great image, this is my number one image, but I’d like to change one person, I can quickly go through and find a nice face from another image. I can put those two together and I’m able to move ahead quickly. So I think the, just the culling process is a lot stronger in Aftershoot. And they continue to make it better. 
So it just makes it much easier for me. I can easily export my images out. I do it right in the program on the computer and it just makes it really seamless and quick. I can now export it out to a catalog.I think that process is a little more seamless with that Aftershoot and certainly for me a lot more user friendly. So that’s why I think Aftershoot is the better program when it comes to culling.
So when it comes to editing both of these programs allow you now to edit in the actual program. It used to be you had to go out into Lightroom to be able to do your editing. But you can actually cull and edit in each of these programs. So Aftershoot has come a long ways as far as catching up to Imagen. Imagen focused more on editing and certainly Aftershoot focused more on culling.But now both these programs you can cull in the program and be able to make those edits with profiles that you’ve chosen, your own or some of the ones that they have featured to make that culling and make that editing process really seamless in the program. 
So Imagen, I’m here in this profile here. If I want to go in and look at my AI profiles I can come here to home. I’m going to look at some talent profiles. I can add a talent profile. And there’s all kinds of profiles you can use and choose one of these to apply to your images. Now this process is really about applying this kind of a preset to your images. 
But the preset also has the ability to increase or decrease the, say the contrast or the highlights. You have the ability to make some changes so that as it goes through in an AI process it’s looking saying, well this one’s really bright but this one’s really dark and try to bring them closer to the same.It’s not just a set preset stuck on the image. It’s trying to make decisions using AI to be able to get things back to a similar look.
The real value of editing in AI is being able to create your own personal profile. Imagen and Aftershoot both do this. Imagen says you need to load at least 3,000 images in other catalogs that you’ve edited. You need to see 3,000 images that you have edited. From that it’s going to take that information and create a personal profile called “Jay P Morgan” and that’s going to give you your profile. I mean, yours won’t be called Jay P Morgan, but it’ll give you your profile the way you edit images, the way you like them to look. And it starts to learn from that process. The more you edit, the more it’s going to change that profile and the stronger it’s going to become. Both of these programs do that. I think that’s an area that is really the most valuable in these programs, is getting an editing process that matches you, your look and what you want things to look like.
So when we go to Aftershoot, they have what they call pre-built profiles. You can get them from different individuals. I can choose these different types. 
You can take a look at which one of these you like, which one’s going to work for what you do. When you click on one of these you can see more about them, exactly what it looks like. 
It gives you the ability to see, you know, how’s it going to look before and after. How it’s going to affect the shadows. What it’s going to do. And you can choose one of these prebuilt profiles. So when I’m done culling here in Aftershoot, across the top right here I can go immediately to editing. So it seamlessly goes to the next step. 
In this editing up here in the top I can apply some kind of a profile that is either from Aftershoot, they’ve got some you can get in the marketplace. I’ve chosen several here. I’ll leave it on the founders style for now. Or I can choose right here, if I want, I can choose to create my own AI profile. 
And as you do edit more and more images of your images as you load Lightroom catalogs they see the edits and you get a profile that really reflects what you do to your images. And that’s the goal you want to load as many images as possible that it will look at and be able to train the AI so that you have your own profile. So once you’ve done that you have a lot of different options down here. You’re going to, you can have cropping which is loose. You can go in to do straightening. You can mask. All those kinds of options. Here you can turn on or off. 
Down at the bottom here I’ve got this every image. It is going to edit every image. I don’t want to do that. I’m going to deselect that. I mean, if I chose my five stars I’d have 367. I don’t want that. The blue were my final finished edited images. These are the images that I really like and that I want to show. And so I’m going to edit those 49 images. Once it gets these edited according to the way I’ve set things up it’s going to open this in Lightroom and I’ll be able to see my edited final edited images in Lightroom. I can make further adjustments there or export them out of Lightroom. So there’s editing. A lot of options there. But building your own personal profile in AI to apply in these programs, that’s the way to go.
All right, let’s look at pricing between these two programs. You know the Aftershoot is pretty straightforward pretty easy to figure out. You pay $10 a month for all of your AI culling. You really don’t get into any of your presets and being able to edit until you go to $15 a month. Then you can go up from there. If you want a personal AI you’re going to need to go to $40 a month.
So Imagen has a pricing structure that’s built more per image. You pay $7 a month and that gives you unlimited culling. But then if you want to use any kind of editing you pay 5 cents an image for editing. So if you think about that, 5 cents per image, 2,000 images is about $100 at 5 cents an image. So that’s a pretty significant amount of money depending on how many images you’re doing. So you can step up to an annual plan at $67 a month. That gives you 18,000 images per year to edit. 
In my experience, if I even went to 72,000 images that’s $240 a month. Not for a year, $240 a month. And that would give me 72,000 images a year. So that would probably be enough. But I’m paying $240 a month for that, you know, times 12 months that’s $3,000 almost, not quite. So it’s a significantly more expensive program. Imagen does give you unlimited AI profiles at that $7 a month. I mean you are paying 5 cents for each image you run through those profiles. 
But it does give you as many of those as you want to set up. Whereas with Aftershoot you have to go to the $40/month plan in order to get those AI profiles. So this pricing is a little difficult to figure out. If you’re really in and want the AI profiles then Aftershoot’s going to cost you about $480 a year to be able to have those profiles. 
Whereas I think the plan with Imagen is going to be significantly more. You can calculate that depending on what you do and how you would use it and just see. If you’re just going to use one of these programs for culling then it’s $10 a month for Aftershoot and it’s $7 a month for Imagen. But I think that the culling in Aftershoot is way superior. 
And I think it’s a much better deal, that $10 a month. All right, the pricing is very difficult to kind of figure out. You have to look at what you’re shooting each year and just see exactly where it falls. But Aftershoot seems pretty straightforward.
Okay, let’s wrap this up. Both of these programs do a great job when it comes to culling. They do a great job when it comes to editing. But for me the process is just much more seamless, it feels more organic to me in Aftershoot. It’s easy for me to bring my images in. I cull them, I edit them, I bring them out into the Lightroom and I move to the next phase. So I just find that process much easier. I think it’s easy to look at the stacks of images in Aftershoot. Whereas I think it’s much more cumbersome to get over in to look at the little strips and have to go through the strips. I love the facial recognition, I’ve said that several times here, which allows me to choose faces and to be able to make those kinds of changes if I need to. So I just feel like Aftershoot gives me a workflow that is much easier for me to follow. It seems more seamless for how I like to work. And in the end, because of the pricing, it just becomes much, much easier because it’s a set price. I know what it’s going to cost me. I’m not trying to decide each time, well do I want to spend all this money to edit or not. I just can do my work and get on and kind of move forward. So I love that. I love AI. I love the fact that both these programs are working on AI. Once you get your profile dialed in according to how you like to edit I think it makes these programs really valuable. And Aftershoot is a strong program in that it gives you that process so seamlessly from beginning to end. So there are my thoughts. I hope you found informative and it helps you make this decision for you and how you work. So you keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’.
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