Imagen AI Editing Review from a Professional Photographer

How I Got Started Using Imagen

This blog post and review has been a long time coming! I first heard about AI (artificial intelligence) editing a few years ago from a fellow photographer. At the time I was still working on perfecting my own style so I wasn’t ready to dive into training a system how to do it for me since I felt like my work needed to be consistent enough to be replicated over and over again.

Fast forward to 2023 when all the world was talking about was artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, and companies were launching AI integrations left and right; it was then that I started to see so many ways that AI could help me as a photographer! I’ll touch on all my favorites in another post later, but the one thing I was most excited about was having AI take over my editing.

The hours and hours spent in front of a computer making minor adjustments until every photo in a gallery of thousands is perfectly straight, perfectly cropped, and perfectly color corrected can really take a toll. That’s where most of the gridlock in my business is, and where I saw the most potential for improving my workflow and adding more time back into my life (hello fellow solopreneurs who work 6-7 days a week 🙋🏼‍♀️). I had tried a few different human editors and companies, but I always had to go back through to fix and re-edit a lot of the galleries, so while it saved me a little time, I just couldn’t find someone who could edit exactly like I would…until I rediscovered Imagen!

By this time I had truly perfected my photography style and even sold my own Lightroom presets which I used on every gallery, so I knew that consistency wouldn’t be a problem anymore. I also knew that it would take a little time on the front end to upload a few thousand photos to run through the system so that it could learn my style, so in the slower winter season of 2024 I started the process and I honestly haven’t looked back!

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My Experience with Imagen

This is the first full year that I’ve used Imagen’s AI culling and editing (yes, they also cull your work!) on all of my sessions from weddings and engagements to commercial and brand photoshoots, and not only has it saved me a lot of time but I’ve also saved a TON of money! I’m talking multiple thousands saved in editor fees! 🤯

Here are a few examples of photos I hand edited and the same photo that Imagen edited. You can see how they’re nearly identical!

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Below are some photos from the most recent wedding I edited in Imagen. Here I’ll be comparing the raw image with Imagen’s edit. So good!

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How Imagen Works + My Personal Workflow

If you’re not familiar with Imagen (or AI editing in general), it basically learns how you edit over time and instead of applying a preset, it analyzes each photo and adjusts accordingly. And it’s constantly learning how you like your photos, so it’ll adjust with you over time.

This is how Imagen works and how I use it in my personal workflow:

1. You can either start by using an already created profile (like mine here!) and get to work right away, or you can create your own profile by uploading 3,000 of your own edited photos so it can learn your style. (You can get 1500 free edits with my code here!)
2. You’ll then go to create a new project by uploading a Lightroom catalog where it’s stored and choosing either cull first, or just edit.
3. I use the cull function and after it uploads the gallery it can cull of wedding of 5,000 images down in less than 30 minutes! You can choose how selective you want it to be when it culls for you. I choose the most selective because I can go back and add a few more photos to the gallery later if I want. As a free bonus, you can review the culled photos with your chosen editing profile already applied so you can see what the final photo might look like before you even purchase the edits!
4. Then I go through the culled photos within Imagen and check if I want to add or subtract any photos, and send the final culled set for editing (again, all within the program). Here you can also choose to crop, straighten, or add additional edits to your photos (such as skin smoothing, etc). I always pick crop and straighten since I’m a stickler for straight lines and horizons! It’ll also show you how much the project will cost before you send it for editing. You’ll be amazed at how cheap it is; usually around $60 for culling and editing a whole wedding for me. 🥳
5. You’ll get an email when your photos are edited (yup, we’re still talking minutes instead of hours!), then you can download the edits and it’ll open your original Lightroom catalog with the photos marked and edited (you can chose how to mark them with either colors, stars, or flags just like Lightroom).
6. Check over Imagen’s work to make sure you like the final product. I usually end up making a few small tweaks here and there. Then export the photos and deliver to your client in record time!
7. Don’t forget the last step, which is crucial to the system learning and adapting to how you edit! You have to go back to your projects in Imagen and click “Upload final edits” for the project when you’re finished. Then it’ll learn what you changed and do even better with your editing next time. (See below for an example of what the projects section looks like with the different stages from culling through submitting final edits for fine-tuning of your profile.)

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My Review of Imagen

My overall review? It’s a game changer! It saves me tons of money and time and is well worth the up front effort! (Pssst…You can actually skip the up front effort by grabbing my editing profile here!)

Here are some other general thoughts and tips:

Initially the culling wasn’t very good (it’s still in beta mode as I write this), but I stuck with it and it quickly got better! Now it can easily choose the best photo in a group of family portraits so I don’t have to go through every single one to see if anyone closed their eyes, etc.

The photos still need a little bit of tweaking when a background is very warm in color or very blue. I assume this is because the program is seeing way too much warm or cool tones for my usual work, just because there’s an abundance of that color in the frame. I think it’ll get better with this over time as I upload more similar backdrops.

I used to hand edit my previews for wedding days, and then afterward upload the gallery to Imagen for culling and editing, but that got a bit confusing and on a few occasions I forgot to mark the photos I had already edited, and they got re-edited by Imagen. So I changed my workflow to sending everything through Imagen, having it cull and edit the whole gallery, then I go through and choose the previews to send over before I look through the rest of the gallery. It makes the time a little longer for the couple to get previews, but it simplifies the whole process for me and gets the final gallery out faster.

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Get 1500 Free Edits and Try out my Personal Editing Profile!

If you’ve made it this far, why not try out Imagen for free? Get 1,500 free photo edits in Imagen here! You can also try and/or buy my personal editing profile here! It’s called the Create in Color by Sarah Eichstedt and is bright and punchy with crisp/clean whites and vibrant, happy colors. Basically, it’s what you see in my work all over my website! Check it out the home page here, or browse weddings/couples and my lifestyle/brand work. You can also find me on Instagram!

Use code BFSARAH50 for 50% off my personal editing profile until Dec 4, 2024.