The Problems with AI


In this current day and age, it seems like every company is putting AI into their products and trying to force people into using it. Every time my photo editing software updates, it tells me about all the brand new AI features that are available. More and more photographers are using AI to write their Instagram captions and their perfectly search engine optimized blog posts.


However, a lot of people are not into the AI hype. I happen to be one of them, and so are a lot of my clients. Between the environmental impact, the stolen work from artists to train many popular models, and the impact it may have on people's critical thinking and creativity skills, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about it.


So the tl;dr is this - if you're worried about the negative impacts of AI and want to work with a photographer who shares your values and shows it in their work and how they run their business, then I'm your girl. If you want to hear more about my thoughts on the AI tools frequently used by photographers, then keep reading!

Generative AI in Online Content


As I mentioned at the beginning, a lot of people have started using tools like Chat-GPT to help them write content for their social media posts and blog posts for their websites. I can certainly understand the appeal -- coming up with what to say in posts can be tedious, boring, and frustrating, and these tools can make it quick and easy and work well to be seen by all the algorithms.


But who wants to read content written by AI? If I'm not even going to put in the effort to write a post, why should you bother to read it? Why spend time reading something I don't want to spend time writing?


Sure, an LLM could perfect the SEO of this blog post, but I'm not writing for an algorithm. I'm writing for people. Of course, I do have to play the SEO game to get people to even end up on my website, but unfortunately, one of my fatal flaws has always been a stubborn refusal to play capitalist games (which is how I ended up a self-employed photographer after working in corporate America for years and hating it). So while I'll still learn enough about SEO to try and make my website easy to find for anyone looking for a queer wedding photographer in Seattle, WA, I don't need AI to do it. I don't want to use a robot to write content to get approval from other robots to then show my work to people. I just want to talk to people.

AI Tools in Photo Editing


Most photographers use Adobe products in their editing workflow. They're generally considered the industry standard. I primarily use Adobe Lightroom Classic for my file management and photo edits with the occasional dip into Photoshop when I need to do an edit that Lightroom isn't quite capable of. Over the past few years, Adobe has been adding more and more AI to both of these programs. There have also been new software companies popping up that offer AI editing tools that Adobe doesn't have yet. I'll go into a deeper dive about some of the tools currently available to photographers and how they're used, and explain my reasoning for how I do or don't use them.


Generative AI for Photo Editing

This is what most people think of when they hear about AI and photos. As far as I'm aware, it's not something that's used in major ways by most portrait and wedding photographers. People usually want their wedding photos to look like their actual wedding, not whatever some GenAI model thinks their wedding should look like, so this makes sense.


Most editing programs (Lightroom and Photoshop included) have started adding "generative remove" tools, where you can select an area around something you want removed from a photo (for example, a bright green exit sign behind a dancing couple), and it will use AI to replace it with what it thinks should be there if the object were removed (in the exit sign example, it could be a blank wall similar to the rest of the wall around the sign). I've used this tool a few times, and while it is sometimes successful, I've found that it often create Lovecraftian nightmares instead of anything actually useful. Even the best results are often not much better than what I can create manually with the heal and clone tools myself, so I don't use it anymore.


Photoshop has a few more advanced generative tools, such as generative fill or generative expand. These tools use AI to create images based on prompts. As I mentioned before, most people want their wedding photos to look like their actual wedding, and my brand, style, and general ethos is built around authenticity and appreciating natural beauty and joy, so it doesn't make sense for me to use this tool in my work.


Denoising & Sharpening

To put it simply, "noise" in photos is the digital equivalent of graininess in film photography. In general, you get more noise in low-light environments (for example, a dark, indoor wedding reception hall). Lightroom and other photo editing programs have started introducing AI denoising features the past couple years. These work by using AI to essentially figure out what the noisy photo "should" look like and smoothing away the noise. I've used it for some of my work, especially for photos taken late at night where I relied on the ambient light instead of my flash, and it does work pretty well. However, I'm planning on reducing my usage of it going forward. The results are good, yes, but not good enough to justify the usage of AI, especially when there are non-AI tool alternatives available.


Sharpening, on the other hand, is for bringing out details that turned out a little bit soft and blurry in a photo. There are several photo editing programs that have AI sharpening tools now (I believe Topaz is one of the more popular ones), where it takes a photo that might be blurry or just not as crisp as the photographer would like, and it uses AI to guess what those details "should" look like if they were sharper. I've seen some photographers use it to recover important shots that were horribly out of focus with some success, but I've also seen videos of people complaining about their wedding photographer sending them photos where everyone's faces look a little bit off that look like, to me, they used AI to sharpen the faces and it made some wrong guesses about what people's faces should look like. Personally, I'm avoiding using it for that reason. If any of my clients are pixel-peeping enough to think my photos need to be sharper than what non-AI sharpening tools can do, then they're probably also going to notice when the very sharp details of photos aren't quite right because of AI.


Anyway, I've been told that grain and blur are in. They're moody and emotional. Why use AI when I can just change it to black and white and really lean into the vibe?


Masking

One of my favorite tools in Lightroom is the masking tool. It allows me to select very specific areas of a photo to adjust. I can darken a background that's distractingly bright or brighten a wedding gown to really make it pop.


Over the past couple years, Lightroom has added a few tools for creating masks with AI. These tools don't alter the photo or generate anything new for the photo. They just automate creation of masks that photographers commonly use -- backgrounds, subjects, people, etc. Before these tools, I had to use a brush tool to manually select the areas I wanted to mask and edit. Now, with a single click, the AI can detect all the eyes in a photo and create a mask over them, which I can use to slightly brighten everyone's eyes at once. It's not perfect, so I do still check to make sure it masked the areas I wanted, but it does save me a lot of time. It makes a tedious manual process much simpler, so I do plan to keep using it going forward. The only difference between photos that are edited with and without this tool is how long it took me to finish editing them.


Culling & Editing

Speaking of editing, there are also new AI software companies out there claiming to help with doing their general culling and editing. Culling is the process of taking the sometimes thousands of photos a photographer took at a shoot or event and selecting only the best that you'll edit and deliver to the client, and editing is the process of adjusting the color, exposure, cropping, etc. of a photo so it's ready to be delivered. There are a few AI companies that do these things for photographers, Imagen and Aftershoot being two popular ones.


These tools aren't quite as evil as some other AI tools out there. They're often trained on the photographer's photos that they input themselves, so they're not trained on stolen art, and some can be trained locally on the photographer's computer instead of at a giant water-guzzling data center. Despite there being fewer ethical concerns, it's still not something I'm currently interested in using. I'm sure it's useful for others, but I don't see it saving much time for me in my current workflow.

The Future?


I don't know how things will change going forward. Maybe we'll get to a point where every single piece of software has generative AI built in. Maybe editing without AI will be seen like editing in a darkroom is today (which I also love to do). Maybe I'll change my mind about AI in the future. Maybe all the AI companies will collapse. For now, I'm perfectly fine being a stubborn Luddite about it, and if that's the kind of photographer you want to work with, then you know where to find me.