AI for Photography

1. Welcome to the AI for Photography Course: Welcome to this course on AI for photography, but wait just a second. This is not a course where you're going to learn how to just come up and generate photography with AI tools. That's not what this course is. What this course is is an honest and responsible guide to being a photographer. Being able to utilize some of the really cool AI tools that are out there and all of the AI enhanced features of your favorite editing apps and tools that you might already be using. In no way is this course meant to replace you with this guy out there taking photos for you? Because of AI tools that can generate images that are already or soon will be imperceptible from real photography. The joy of photography is what's most important and capturing true moments, experiences, and stories. That's what I'm most excited about as a photographer. In this course, we'll cover five main categories of tools and things you can do with AI, such as photo editing. So all the cool things that within your editing apps you can do, we'll learn how AI tools can actually enhance and make your photo quality resolution, things like that better. Then we'll also look at how we can use these tools to better plan and get inspiration for photo shoots to start, run, and grow your photography business, as well as how to use it for feedback as sort of a mentor when you don't have someone like me or another photo buddy or friend helping you out. Now, the way this course actually works is for each topic or section, I'll go over the different use cases and break down what you can do within photo editing, for example, using AI tools. I'll cover the recommended tools that I suggest. And then the rest of the section is going to be diving into real world demonstrations where I quickly show you how to use the tools. Alright, keep watching the next lesson. I'll go over five ideas just to get you started and get the brain rolling with ideas for what you can use AI for as a photographer. Alright, see you there. 2. 5 Quick Ideas for Using AI as a Photographer: Five quick examples of things we will be covering throughout the course. There's lots more in each section, but speedy culling. This is something that takes a lot of time, especially if you're doing photo shoots like family photos, couples, headshots, where you get dozens or hundreds of photos in similar positions with these new AI features, both in tools like Lightroom, but also in separate tools that we'll be covering in this class, you'll learn how to speed up that import and organization workflow. Upscaling and noise removal. So actually taking photos and increasing the resolution and maintaining quality, that's something that we can do, reducing noise. This is awesome because if you have a crop sensor camera or not the fanciest camera that reduces all of that noise in a photo, you can do it now with a tool on your computer and not have to pay for that fancy gear, which is super awesome for helping to level the playing field. One of the most powerful features that I do think is really cool is distraction removal and masking tools where you can quickly select mask your subject, the background, the sky. These are things that I used to do and we used to do manually, and we would then make adjustments. But the fact that AI can basically see these things for us, whether it's a person and selecting their eyes or their face or their skin or the background or just the sky, editing apps are more powerful than ever, and it's really just a way to speed up that workflow for us so that we can get to the fun stuff. Outside of just strictly photo editing apps, I wanted to talk about how we can use some of the other tools, the ChatGPT, the Google Geminis, the clods out there to help with the process of being a photographer. So things like looking up locations, whether you're going out on your own personal photoshoot, or if you're looking for places for a great family photo shoot session in your area or somewhere that you've never been to before, that's one idea. And then, for example, start when you're running your photo business, drafting contracts, drafting emails, drafting social posts. These are all things we can do with these tools and I'll be walking through that in that later section as well. So the goal is to give you dozens of ideas that you can start implementing right now, break down how you do them and actually demo them using the tools. And hopefully by the end of the course, you can walk away with a handful that you feel comfortable and confident using yourself. Alright, so thank you so much again for being here. If you have any questions along the way, make sure you just reach out. Otherwise, I will see you in the next section. Byte. 3. Photo Editing with AI: Welcome to this new and first section of the AI photography course. And this one, we're going over photo editing and how can AI help you in your editing process. So this is probably the most exciting and transformative section of this course because what we're going to learn can really change how you work as a photographer. I'm going to first go through several of the different things that you can do with AI. I'll cover the tools that do these. And then in the next lessons, it's going to be demos of actually doing these. So the first way that AI can help you in photo editing is with culling or organizing and sifting through photos. This is when you are importing a bunch of photos, especially when you are taking photos of people like a portrait session, headshot session, family photos, group photos, even things like event photos, wedding photography, you know, bursts of three, five, ten photos at a time. This can take a lot of time to go through manually. Now most of these editing tools like Lightroom, but also some of these newer ones like AfterShoot and Imagine, these actually help to do this for you. So the app will run through your photos. I will automatically detect if people's eyes are open, if it's a little blurry, if there's motion blur, things like that, and it will mark those as non selects. Or likely non selects. And each tool does it differently. But basically, what it does is it just takes 75 to 80% of that effort away from you in an instant so that you can look at the very best of the best. And, of course, with all these tools, you do have to be careful and probably go through the first time you use it manually, just to double check. But what I found is that it does a really, really good job for at least a first pass. So culling, super, super time saving with these new AI features. Next, we've got batch editing. Most of these editing apps have some auto editing feature. The line is blurred between, what's AI versus what's not AI. We already had an auto edit feature in most of these apps that could expose it properly, I could fix the white balance, those things. However, using these new AI editing apps, it's actually detecting things like subjects, if it's a person, if it's an animal, if it's a landscape, the different type of photography and editing based off of what's actually in your photo. So it's more than just using a preset. And again, for photographers doing event photography or portrait sessions where you're taking photo tons of photos, this is super helpful. Very similarly retouching, but specifically things like retouching skin, faces, lips, eyes, hair. All of that, there's these great tools that can do this automatically for you. Next, we've got masking and local adjustments. So this is where you're editing a specific part of your image. And this is where I find that I am happy for these enhancements that the tools have made using AI features because before we could manually go in and draw a mask around a subject or use a radial mask or a linear gradient and then brush it out or select it on or off. But now we have masks that can auto detect subjects, objects, backgrounds, foregrounds, eyes, lips, hair, skin. I can detect anything on your photo basically and make that selection for you. And the creativity and the artistry then goes back to you as a photographer. So this is where there's going to be times in this course where things are a little bit blurry, whether you know, as a photographer, I feel comfortable letting AI do the work for me versus me as the photographer doing that work and making those choices for my own photos. But this is one where I happy that these tools have improved mass selections and things like that. So this is a big one, and I'm excited to dive into this in the demos. Now, blurring the lines a little bit more, we have removing objects and distractions. Again, before AI features, we could do this with cloning tools, with healing brush tools. And, of course, there were some photographers who argued that shouldn't be done because any photo, the raw photo is the photo, that is the art, not removing distractions and things, removing wires in the background or things like that. I think it really depends on the photo, and there is sort of a blurry line there, and it allows us to create photos that otherwise wouldn't have been possible. You've probably seen these features advertised a lot. Even with our phones, most of them have a remove distractions feature now where you're standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with tons of people in the background, and you can just circle and draw out those people to get that photo of you. Which is likely not possible to take that photo without these kinds of tools. But again, this is that line of, is this fair to say this was the actual photo or not? The end of the day, it's your photo, and it's up to you to decide if you're happy removing those kinds of distractions. There's also things like removing dust and grain or if you have little spots on your sensor, you can do this super fast with AI, and that's always helpful. Next, we have edge expansion, which also is blurring that line a little bit more. Say you take a photo and you want there to be more space, headroom on the side of the photo, you can do that with AI, and these tools will basically generate an image for you based off of what is in your original image, and kind of cool, kind of scary, though, how powerful it can be. In Photo restoration. So old photos, there's some really cool tools that you can just throw in an old scanned photo if it has dust, scratches, bent, crinkles. I will fix that up just like that. So these are just some of the most popular things you can do with photo editing tools to check out. I'm going to be showing you a lot of these, but we've got Lightroom, which has built in features, AfterShoot narrative, imagine, topaz, Luminar Neo. These are all tools that have different specialties. Some are better at the culling and the organization. So are good for doing sort of an AI pass at automated editing. Others are better at the things like edge expansion, and I'll be covering and diving into these in the next lessons. So check them out, and I'll see you in those next lessons. 4. A Quick Note About Upcoming AI Demos: Just a quick note about all of the demos that I'm about to show you in this section, but also in future sections. I want to be perfectly clear that I want this course to be an inspiration to you to show you what these tools are capable of. By no means, is this a demo of every single AI tool of every single AI application out there? And as you can see in the organization of the class, the point is to show you the types of things you can do more than just show you the tools themselves. And so there are some things like if I'm reducing noise, upscaling, removing distractions, I will show you in multiple tools. And the point is to give you a little bit of a compare and contrast between the different tools that let you do that. But you'll also notice that I don't cover every single feature within all of these tools. Once you understand the basics of how to do it in one, for example, how to refocus something that's out of focus, it's pretty much the same in all of the tools. I do talk about the differences between the tools a bit. So by the end of the course, you should have a sense of my opinion, which ones I like, which ones I prefer. Ultimately, my goal is to show you a variety of tools and features so that then you can get out there feeling confident about the things you should be doing or could be doing with AI. And as I've said before, these tools are going to change. New features are coming out every day. Placement of buttons and things might look a little different depending on when you watch it. The cost might change, the app might change. So try not to worry about that. The important thing is to understand the different capabilities and not exactly where the button is that you push to do those things. With that, thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the first demo coming right up. 5. AI-Powered Culling in Lightroom: In this demo, I'm going to show you the culling feature in Lightroom. I'm in Lightroom Classic, but it works very similarly if you're in just the regular Lightroom version as well. So, to use culling, you have to go to your import window and open up a source for importing. You'll notice that it has this assisted culling that is great out right here. Once I find the folder that I want to import, I'm going to import this portraits folder, which was from a little experimental edit that I did before. It's a good example of what you do you might be using assisted cooling for. Before I import or do anything, I'm going to check that assisted culling button up here, and it's starting to analyze over on the left hand side. Then once it's done analyzing, you'll see that it has 14 selects and two rejects. And you'll notice that some of these have checkmarks, and others have the X. Now, if you're taking a bunch of photos, especially if it's like a family portrait session, couples or not yourself, you're much more likely to have photos where people were blinking. It might be slightly out of focus. Maybe if you're using flash, there's an exposure miss fire, and all of that is going to be caught by this assisted culling feature. You can go through manually and change things from a selection to a not select by right clicking and marking the photo as act rejection or the opposite changing a photo to a select. But really the AI power of this is that it is looking and scanning your photos, and it is seeing the ones that are in focus, in focus are they? Are your eyes open, and you can see this over here in the top left. And it's making selects based on that information. Some of these, we can adjust how particular it is. So if you only want, for example, starting at the top with the subject focus, if you only want sharpest images as a select, then you can increase that rating, and you'll see that now only these two are selected. So let me open that up. So that one's pretty sharp. This one is a little bit not as sharp, which is true. So you can adjust how particular the sharpness is. You can also choose to check on or off the eye focus as a filter. So reject photos without people's eyes. So that would be like, if there happens to be a photo where there's no eyes in it, then won't include it. So you're out on a family photo shoot, and then you take a couple photos of the landscape or just the background just to get the lighting or exposure settings right or whatever. But you don't want to import those or edit those, it will reject those. But then also you have this slider, again, where you can adjust the sharpness of the eye focus, if you want it to include more that are maybe not as sharp, then you drag that to the left. And then eyes open. That's a really cool one because say someone's blinking, maybe you're shooting in burst mode or something like that, you can turn turn that on to reject if it doesn't see that someone's eyes are open. You can also have these other filters for rejecting things like documents, misfires, exposure issues. There's none of that in this photo shoot, but that would basically filter those out. And then the other cool thing, which also semi AI powered is this auto stack feature. Say you are capturing a bunch of photos and, like, a burst, and then you have your whoever you're taking photos of change positions, and you're taking those photos maybe 30 seconds later or something like that. You can actually automatically group or stack those. When I check that on, it has a standard stack time of create stacks when there is a 1 minute gap between those shots, basically, anything any photos that were taken within 1 minute are stacked together. In less than 1 minute apart. And so, again, you can kind of adjust the timing of this, which will actually help with the grouping of the positioning of how I was taking photos of myself. And you can imagine this would work really well if again, you were taking photos family, and you have them holding hands, then you have them walking away. Then you have them, kissing each other or whatever it is, and you can adjust that sort of manually with the capture time. You can do that automatically with visual similarity. Now, based off of the standard similarity scale, all of these photos look similar to Lightroom. And actually, if I increase this, it takes a while before it starts to create separate stacks. But you can see, as I increase this, it does start to do some different stacks like where here I'm looking up and away, here, again, this one hand on face, but looking down. And I can kind of adjust this to, like, get different groupings. This is not the best example of how this works. If you play around with this when you have multiple people, different positions, you'll really see the power of that. And that's just going to actually when you import it, it'll create that stack, and it appears as a stack underneath. And I'll do that just to show you what that looks like. And that way, when you're trying to pick the best photo from every setup, for example, you know that all those photos are in one stack. Now, here I just really quickly wanted to show you this other shoot, little quick casual wedding photography shoot that I did to show you that visual similarity feature. So here, you'll see that I have photos of, like, the dances, just some photo group photo outside, cake cutting. And by checking on the visual similarity, it does a decent job at just creating a stack of those different events. If I increase sort of the pickiness of this, then you can see that I can go from just a group of dancing photos to it knows the group of photos of the groom and his mother and then the bride and her dad. And then from there, what I can do is I can actually go in here, click on this stack icon. And now I can choose the ones that I want to import or not. So you can go in and quickly uncheck the ones that are not rated or they are rejects, basically, and then make the selection of the one that is best for this stack. Of course, you can double click to look in using my arrows to go right and left. And you see one with the eyes closed, one with the eyes open, and I can make my selection. Do I want the one with the eyes closed or open? I think I'm going to go with the one with the eyes open for this scenario. And then just by clicking sort of the edge of the stack right there, that little icon, it closes it down. Again, a quick way to go through a bunch of photos and find the ones that look the best. Got a few photos right here, all different people, so I'll probably keep all those. This setup right here, I've got a couple, but this one was a selection versus this one not a selection. And you can see why it's doing it based off of this rating up here. So the subject out of focus, it has a 48 score versus this one has 74. So I would like to keep the one that has the 74 versus the 48. So you have to uncheck the ones that you don't want to import. If you don't want to import, that is. And you can do that quickly by selecting and changing the view down here to just see your rejected photos or just the selex. So if you just see all the rejected photos, you uncheck those, for example, even though I'd probably go in there and see if there's any that I want from that photo, let me turn off the stacks for a second. And so I would go in here, deselect all of those ones or just click Unchecked All down at the bottom, go to my selects. They're all selected right now. But again, I can stack them and see, Okay, from the cake, which one do I want? Go in. This one has a subject focus 71. This one is 57. So I'd probably go with the one that has the higher subject focus. Of course, also based off of the photo itself, does it look good? Do I like the composition, all of those other things as well? And then you import them. So basically, it's just a great way to automatically sift through your photos and assist with sifting through those photos. And just telling you, before you go through manually one at a time yourself, which photos are likely to have the focus be really good? Which ones are the photos with people's eyes open or not? Alright, thank you so much for watching this tutorial and this demo of the Lightroom culling feature. And I will see you in another demo. 6. AI-Powered Culling with AfterShoot: Welcome to this demo of the AI cool feature in AfterShoot. What's great about this is that you can use it right here in AfterShoot to col and then even edit. Or if you use another editing app that doesn't have a cool feature, or even if it does, like Lightroom, if you like the culling of AfterShoot, you can coal here in AfterShoot and then export or directly send photos to your editing app of choice, which can still save you a lot of time. So we'll look at how you do that, but all you have to do on this home screen is click Create an album and then choose the folder or drag and drop a folder or files here, you can even drag and drop a Lightroom catalog here as well for Edit, and then drag and drop your photos or a folder here. In this cool and edit window. I'm going to import this wedding that we saw in the Lightroom lesson previously just to see and compare the differences in what you can do with AfterShoot compared to Lightroom. It opens up all the images. Then you can click Cooling and now I'm going to click Start cooling. You change what type of shot this is, which is going to determine the type of culling that you are doing. So for example, it has a weddings and engagements, for example, but also all these other types of shoots that coaling would be helpful for. It has an automated AI cooling and then a customized. Let's go ahead and do the automated cool and I'm just going to choose standard and choose start cooling for now. So now that it has processed, it has a number of categories that it automatically gives your photos. First, your green ones are all the selected photos. These are the photos that it thinks are good photos. The highlighted photos in blue are their highlights. They are the ones that it thinks are the best photos. So it's kind of a cool thing that it automatically finds ones that it thinks are the best photos from your session. If you drop down the four review menu and check on the four review checkbox, it will open up the photos that it basically filtered out, ones that are filtered because it's blurry or because there are closed eyes. Again, you might want to go in here and adjust those because just because someone's eyes are closed doesn't mean that you don't want that photo, necessarily, but it's cool that you can see them highlighted over here based off of those colors. Now, everything is given a rating as well. You can see closed eyes like one star, blurred, two stars, the highlights selected four and five stars, for example. Other thing that it automatically does is it creates these little stacks of similar photos. So you can see that stack over here and you can filter through the stacks, and you can see that it actually chooses one that it prefers the one highlighted in green. You can go into any of these photos, right click and change the star rating or change the color. So for example, if I like this photo, I can change that color to green, for example. And now that is a selected photo as well. Also, along with the stacks, you can see that some of these have warnings, and you can click on that, and it will tell you what that warning is. Also, quick note there are keyboard shortcuts for assigning those different star ratings or color ratings, for example, 12345 will set 12345 will set those star ratings and then 6789, and then the dash will assign those different colors if you are interested in that. If you click on another photo, you'll see that it changes the key faces, which is cool because it gives you sort of a zoomed in look. You can see, was it in focus? You can see their eyes and see it a little bit clear if their eyes were open, closed, et cetera, giving you an easy look rather than opening up the photo zooming in and out to see if their eyes are open and in focus. Now, we have all these filters, but what do we actually do with this information? We still have to make our selections, and we do that with the keyboard shortcut P. So you can go through your different photos via the stacks or just the ones that it has selected and press P on your keyboard. And you'll see that my selections, it starts to add these photos as I go through them. Just using your arrows on your keyboard, you can go left, right, going through each of these photos, making the selections, and just adding them to your selections. Here is where you have now you're quickly filtered with the AI assisted culling selections, and you can go through and edit or you could even go and export them, and you could export them right into the editing program that you like, such as Lightroom Classic, Lightroom or to a folder on your computer, and it'll make that raw DNG file that you would like to be able to edit fully in your own app. You can do editing in AfterShoot, but if you're used to or want to edit in another folder, then you just send them, export them or put them on your computer this way. Now, if we did this from scratch, we can customize our AI CL options down here. So you can choose whether you want highlight photos or not. You can group them or stack them like we saw or not. So if you don't want to have it stacked, you don't have to, and you could also choose to have that stack be like a big group, large group, that means less specific, less particular or small groups would be very particular about the grouping, but you would get more groups. Blurry detection, closed eye detection, very similar to what we saw in Lightroom. But this just gives you those options ahead of time before it starts coaling. So say we don't want the duplicate photos, maybe we want strict blurry photo detection. And we want close eye detection. We're going to do that. Choose start cooling. It's processing that already up here, and now it's going to reopen all of those photos, and I like how it gives you a little how much time it saved you already from using this feature. So they're not stacked anymore, but it still gives you the selects and then some for review. And here is where you would go in for review, go in and say, actually, I do like that photo, so I'm going to go ahead and change that rating to a five. So just tapping five on my keyboard automatically goes there. And just using the arrows on my keyboard with this full screen view, it's pretty cool because it brings up the faces again, which is one of the most important parts of any type of photo like this. Eyes close, eyes open. I want both of those. This one's kind of similar, though. I look at the orientation of them and I say, actually, I think I like that one better. So maybe I don't choose that one. So I change my star rating to two, for example. I can go back to my grid view here. And again, just go through things manually. Again, you still have to go through and make your selection. So you could go through and manually flag them with P, your keyboard, or you can select multiple and press P on your keyboard to flag all of them at one time. So say you just want to see all your selected photos or the ones that it selected, you can select all, press P on the keyboard, and now all of those are selected. Cool. So that's the demo of AfterShoot, AI culling feature. I'll see you in another lesson. 7. AI-Powered Batch Editing with AfterShoot: Welcome to this demo of AfterShoot AI editing features. So say you've imported photos, you've cold some or not, just click create an album, import your photos. Or if you already have one, like I did previously, I have this wedding, you can just double click to open that folder. Now you can go into the editing tab here and you can filter by your selections or your ratings or whatnot to only show the photos that you want to show. So, for example, I just want to show my five star rated photos, for example. In this window, you see that on the right, there are a number of AI styles that you can choose from. We're going to start with this, but you also have the ability to create an AI profile which can be trained based off your photos, which is pretty amazing. So you can scroll through these styles. It's sort of like a preset. And then when you find a style that you like, for example, you can choose it, click Select AI Profile. And from here, you can choose whether it's going to crop, straighten and mask automatically. Let's turn those on just to see what the power of it does, and then click Edit Photos. And now it has processed all of the images, and you can actually see that it does a decent job at matching things like the colors and the exposures. And again, this is more advanced than just slapping on a preset, because when you slap on a preset in any program, it's not going to also automatically adjust the exposures to try to match. It's not going to automatically crop or straighten out lines. And that's happening here. You can go in and adjust the profile. Say you think that everything's a little bit flat or not as contrasty or too saturated or too cool, warm, et cetera. Maybe I want to bring down my whites and my highlights just a little bit on some of those photos, they looked a bit much and then build that contrast by bringing down the Blacks quite a bit. You can also go in there and do that with your tone curve and these other settings as well. And then click Save and Edit again. I don't like about AfterShoot here is that you're not looking at an individual photo and really easily being able to adjust the things up and down. So I'm going to go ahead and click Edit. It's going to process that again. I can see that in some of these photos, especially the ones with the flash, it's a bit bright and too flashy on their face. And this is not how I would have edited these photos myself, but it does match that profile quite a bit. So it has processed those with the changes I made to the profile, and it actually did a lot better job. This photo right here, it was just too overexposed, and that's something I personally didn't like about that profile. And maybe it's just based off that profile, but you can make those tweaks or pick a different profile. If you do want to just re edit all the photos using a different profile, you can do that. So you can choose one of these pre downloaded ones or explore the marketplace, which is cool because now you can by these different profiles, the ones that you like. For example, maybe I want to try this Macha globe, black and white. I'm going to try that out. Once that has downloaded back in the editing window, I can choose that and restart my editing. Up here, you choose that AI profile. Again, you can choose one of the ones that's preset or pre downloaded or one that you download. Click Edit. And now you can see it starts to populate that preset edit. Pretty cool. Pretty darn cool. So we saw how you can use one of these AI profiles to edit your photos. I want to create my very own profile, though. From your Home tab or from the AI Profiles tab, you can click Create AI Editing profile. The cool thing about this is that you can actually use your own photos that you've edited to train it. You'll need 2,500 edited photos directly from Lightroom Classic or capture one to train your AI profile on. And so if you edit a lot of photos in very similar styles, this is going to be for you because you can just click Create. And then once you get in here, you can name it. You can choose if you're editing raw or JPEC photos, the colors or black and white, and where you're importing from. Now, the issue is that you need 2,500 edited images. And so it will import from your catalogs. And so if you don't have that many photos in your catalogs, it's not going to be enough to actually train the photos or your editing. And so once you have enough photos selected, you can click Upload. I will show you the other way that you can create a profile from scratch by clicking AI profiles at the top, clicking New profile, and now you can create an instant AI profile. And this can come from a Lightroom preset. If you have Lightroom installed, you have this drop down box here that will actually open up all the presets that you have in Lightroom. And so if there's one that you've created, one that you like, you can choose that as sort of a starting point. If you have the file on your computer, you can drop it here. Or if you want to just start from scratch with an AfterShoot preset, you can do that as well. For example, just clicking through some of these presets, kind of preset looks. You could start from there, say you like the light and airy look. Give it a name. And now it's going to actually apply that first profile look to a photo for you to see how it looks, and then you can make some adjustments for your own profile. So here it gives you this sort of preview of a sample image and what it would look like. You can make an adjustment, say you like everything to be a little bit brighter. You can make an adjustment for exposure, which is the first setting. Here's an indoor photo, so you can kind of give it a different look for, like, indoor, for example, outdoor natural light. You make your adjustments there, temperature adjustments. Maybe you like things to be a little bit warmer, both on the interior shot as well. Yep, like that. Tint adjustments. So you basically go through all of these basic adjustments, and then it will start to build that AI profile for you. And now you can start editing with it. So you can go to an album or from your home screen albums, you can go through and you can edit your photos with your very own light and airy profile that you create. That's a very basic option for creating a profile. It's much better to import a light room preset that you have created based off of edits that you like. Or if you do the professional way of actually importing your Lightroom catalog and having it analyze 2,500 plus photos and base its profile off of those images. So now when you have that profile created and you import new photos or want to edit any photos that you have in AfterShoot, you can choose that profile from the drop down here. You could still make any changes to your cropping, straightening, AI masking if you want to, and then click Edit Photos. I'm just going to turn off AI masking, choose Edit Photos. Here I've imported my travel photos catalog. And it's going to apply that general profile to these photos. Now, this profile is not going to be as advanced as importing a light room preset or from training AfterShoot on your photography. But you can see that it does somewhat of a decent job at applying a similar style to these photos. There are still a bunch of edits I would probably make and things that it didn't do properly. For example, this photo here, the white balance and things were really off because it was photo at night in front of the louv with nasty lighting. So it obviously didn't fix that, but it applied that look to it, which is a starting point. Now, these photos all taken at different times, different places, different lighting. So applying one profile is similar to when you apply one preset. It often doesn't work for every different photo. However, if you have a profile that works for portraits or family photos, and you generally shoot photos at the same time of day or in the same location, it's going to work like magic and save you a ton of time. And once you've applied that, of course, you can go up and export your photos. You can export them directly into one of these other editing apps to make those changes that you like, or export to a folder for importing, saving, et cetera, on your computer. So that is AfterShoot AI editing demo. I know this was a lot. It's pretty powerful stuff. I would find this super beneficial if I was doing more headshots, portraits, weddings, events, those kinds of shoots. For general photography, I don't think it's the best tool, but like I said, for those ones, it's going to save you a ton of time. All right, thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next lessons. 8. AI-Powered Batch Editing with Imagen: Welcome to this demo of Imagine AI's editing features. So if you've downloaded Imagine, you can get started by creating an AI profile that will help you quickly edit your photos, and you'll need to do that first. So from the home screen, just click Add a profile, and then you have the three options. One is just basically a quick profile based off of a preset that you've created or used in Lightroom. You also have this recommended personal AI profile. So similar to if you watch the AfterShoot demo, it will actually import and read your Lightroom catalog of files and photos with at least 2000 photos and create a profile based off of your editing tendencies, excuse me, or you can pick a profile from their profile showcase, which is probably what most people want to get started with because it's the simplest and you might not know exactly or have a preset that you want to use. So let's go ahead and just start with one of these. Get a very basic sense of what these look like. Just looking at it right here. I click Compare there, and I can go through these photos now and kind of see what this profile Peachy by PBX looks like, which I really actually like. I'm going to go ahead and choose a couple of these other ones just to see if there's ones that actually look good. I'm going to go back here because it's really actually hard to see those examples, although I do like Peachy Um, that one. Let's see, maybe sports. Let's compare that style. You know, of course, these are similar to presets in that sometimes they work for certain types of shoots, sometimes they don't. So that's how you can kind of compare and contrast. I want to use that Peachy one. Where did Peachy go? Let's go ahead and choose use to Edit there. Click Continue to Edit. And now you can import your photos to edit either via your Lightroom Classic catalog or from a folder. I think most of us are going to be using a folder of photos. I'm going to be using this travel folder of photos that I put together for this course. This is just a random assortment of travel photos from the past couple of years. And now when I import that, it has the name of that. I'm going to choose the AI profile I want to edit. You can make adjustments to this profile. By things like temperature, tint exposure, that kind of thing. I'm going to leave it as the profile itself because I obviously picked that profile because I liked that kind of look. You can choose what type of photography this is. So I'm going to put this, mostly landscape and nature, and then you can choose which AI tools to use. Crop straighten, smoothing skin, subject mask, which will sort of maybe make some changes to the subject versus not the background, teeth whitening, sign removals, background masking. These are still in Beta right now. There's some other tools as well that I'm not going to use here, but if I was doing something like real estate photography, yeah, I want that window poll. I want that perspective correction. If I was doing portraits, then I would, yeah, do these smoothing skin perhaps and whitening teeth. But for my travel photos, I'm just going to click Edit now and it's going to process those photos. Alright, so this took about 5 minutes to process, and now what I have to do is download to review, which I don't love. I would rather be able to see my edits right here in Imagine because this is just another step that I'm going to have to take to view them, export them that I would much, much rather see write in Imagine. So now, I've opened these photos in Lightroom, and I can give them a little preview, which is pretty cool because you can see the adjustments that it has made to these photos, which it changes based off the photo, different than just slapping on a preset like we've seen in Lightroom, where you can apply a preset. These adjustments are custom to each photo based off of the original photo itself, which makes it much more powerful than a preset. And I actually like what it's done for that profile. They look very similarly edited, similar style, compared to the original photos, which were taken in a bunch of different places. I actually think the style doesn't necessarily work for this photo, but it actually did a better job editing it than the AfterShoot version of this edit. So not bad. And so from here, we can make our tweaks and edits right in room and export them. And if you've made some tweaks to them and maybe you're often making some sort of similar tweak maybe the color temperature or the effects or something that you've added to it, you can actually go back to Imagine, upload your final edits, and this is actually going to allow you to create a new profile based off of that original one, but with your personal adjustments. So that's basically how you do it with Imagine. To create your own profile from the home or from the AI Profiles button, you can click create your own profile. Remember, you can do the whole custom thing by importing your photos from a Lightroom catalog or a light personal one. So let's just call this Phil black and white profile. And then you can import a preset. This can come from Lightroom or any other editing app that allows you to create and export XMP presets or even ones you find online. This drop down will actually see all presets that you have in Lightroom on your computer already. So there's a ton of these that we've created from video school online and photography and friends. And so for example, if we go, Let's find the ones that we've created, we have these black and white ones, for example. And if I knew I can't remember off the top of my head that black and white four was the one that I liked. I can select that preset and make a profile out of it. You then make some adjustments to the basics of it, like exposure, like it a little bit darker. This photo I color temperature. I think a little cooler. Now, this isn't going to really affect much because it's a black and white preset. But once you've gone through those basic survey settings, you can click Build Profile. It's creating that profile for you, and now I'm going to edit with this profile. I'm going to edit those same travel photos. Travel, and I'll just call this fold or travel black and white. I'm going to use my profile that is now here, landscape and nature. And this time, let's just not choose crop and Straten and we will just click Edit. While this is processing, I'll just share some final thoughts. It's a pretty cool program for applying profiles. It does a very similar thing to AfterShoot. I would probably prefer AfterShoot because you can actually preview and see your images right in the app. It does a very similar thing though of creating a profile based images, your presets, or some of the presets or profiles that other photographers have created and imagine previously. But I really do not like the process of having to download to review in your own editing app. Of course, once you have downloaded for review, you can go in and download the edits, but it's just sort of a clunky process and not time saving because we're going between different apps. And that's not why I'm using this tool. I'm using this tool to save time. So being said, all of these apps have their different prices, payment options, different free trials, so you can play around with them and to find the one that you like best. Alright, so that has processed, again, about 5 minutes for these ten photos, so it's not super quick. I'm going to download for review. Download its. Alright, so here we have those photos opened from Imagine into Lightroom. And again, we can go in and we can make adjustments to the photos after the fact. We can see all the adjustments that have been made. And it does, again, a decent job at applying the same type of look to all of these photos based off of all kinds of different original settings. Of course, this is probably not the profile that I would use for most of these photos. I takes away a lot of the epicness that the colors provide. But you can see that it's working. That is imagine. So that's how you use it. As I mentioned before, I do think that other tools like AfterShoot do a better job at using AI editing profiles. I wouldn't be surprised if Lightroom starts to utilize some of these AI profile editing based editing, not just with presets very soon too. So stay tuned for those updates. Otherwise, I will see you in another lesson. 9. One Slider to Rule Them All with Luminar Neo: In this tutorial, I'm going to show you the one AI slider that you need to know from Luminar Neo for editing. So once you've imported photos by clicking Add Photos and then finding the photos or the folder that you want to add into the catalog, just click the Edit button. I'm not going to go through all of these, but some of these, if it has the little AI symbol, they utilize AI features to automatically make adjustments. But the one that I love is this AI enhanced feature. Click that and then choose accent or the slider under accent and just drag it to the right, and you'll automatically improve your photos, for the most part, I found that. This is the one slider that I love playing with underneath the hood, what's going on is it's playing with over 12 different properties from the different exposures to color, saturation, sharpness, all these things that it's doing to basically make your photo look, well, I would say better. And so that's the one slider that you need. Now let's go to a different photo and show you what that would do. Here is a photo unedited pretty flat if I go to AI Enhance. Again, it's brightening things, making it still look natural, but just makes things pop. Let's go to a landscape. Here is a landscape from Sion Switzerland. Again, AI Enhance. We're going to increase that slider. And it's doing a pretty good job at sharpening things. Now, with this photo, white balance is off, it's not fixing that, so I'd probably go in there and make some changes. But there's also this sky enhancer, which is basically doing a lot of what Dee Hayes does in Lightroom, but it does it at a much more natural way. I like that a lot. I still need to go in and tweak some things. They do have all of those options here under the developed tab for things like light color. I find those sliders are a little bit finicky compared to doing the same thing in a tool like Lightroom. However, that little enhanced slider, I really love that. Let's go one more. Enhance making things pop. Now, there is a masking option. So say, let's go ahead into this photo here. If we want to enhance, but we just want to enhance not the sky, for example, we can do a mask and we can either use a brush and linear gradient, object select, similar to Lightroom, let's just select this here and now go back to our adjustments. And if we do this slider, it's making those adjustments just to where our mask was. You'll also see this sky feature. So this is a sky replacement feature where you can choose one of these presets for the sky types and then change the clouds, for example, some of these look pretty natural, actually, very similar to the Photoshop sky replacement feature as well, which isn't really AI, but it's just doing a quick job masking and changing that sky with that tool. So, play around with that. If you have Luminar Neo, pretty cool slider, and it's the one that I use. You'll see a ton of these other ones. I'm not going to go through all of them, but just play around with them, and I'll see you in another tutorial. 10. AI-Powered Masking in Lightroom: One of the coolest things you can do now in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, which I'm in right now is powerful mask selections. These are being updated every year with new features. We've seen people added in the past. I mentioned that earlier where you can literally select any person in your photo, you could select it pops up and shows the skin, hair, eyes, et cetera. I have all of that info on a tutorial in our light room course if you're in that course. In this lesson, I wanted to show you the newest one, which is landscape. And you can see that after it processes, it gives you the mask options that it has selected, which do a pretty good job. Like, look at this. You can select just the vegetation in this photo or just the architecture, which would take minutes. Minutes to go in and manually do this. And, of course, it doesn't do a perfect job, but the point is that with any of these selections, we can then go in and say, Okay, let's select the vegetation, create that mask. And now we can make any of our adjustments that we want. We can add a little bit more of a green tint. We can really boost the contrast or the texture of this vegetation, the clarity, make that pop, maybe add a bit more saturation or even warmth. And maybe if the vegetation down here looks good, then we'll create a new mask. Again, we'll go select landscape, and then mountains, create that mask. And with these mountains in the background, it really was kind of bluish and overexposed, so we can bring down that exposure. Up the contrast to get the details of those mountains back to where it looks more natural and beautiful. And this is just starting to look really good. And I'm not going to go through how I actually edit my photos because that's all in the light room class. But in this one, really the power is the fact that with AI, we can now detect things like subjects in our photo. So just tapping the subject, it's going to do a beautiful job selecting not only the bird, but also the reflection in this photo, which is really cool. And add those sharpen up the texture, add details to this bird. Here, let's go to this example here. If we do subject, cool. It selects exactly what I would expect it to in the foreground. It's got the clover that I'm holding in my hand. Now, say we don't want that whole thing, don't want the whole subject, maybe we want to choose and objects. So we can click Object and you have your brush with the brush mode or a little sort of square selector, and we can just highlight over the clover. It's going to detect objects all using the power of AI, and now we can really do whatever we want. Let me show you a quick trick. Let me actually duplicate and invert that mask by right clicking and choosing duplicate and invert. And now let's go ahead and drop the saturation of the background. And now we have a really cool St. Patrick's Day style sort of edit that would I don't know, kind of cool. But the point is that with all of these different mass features that are now powered by AI, we can go in here and quickly and easily select the sky and make changes to the sky. And this is something that as an editor, you could do manually, and this is where I feel like this use of AI, the ability to detect types of objects and subjects and things in an image, I don't feel like that is necessarily a bad thing. It's just speeding up our workflow so that we can get to the more creative part of it, which is what do we do with the sky? What do we do with the architecture or the vegetation? Do we want to blur that out even more and just drop that sharpness, maybe make it blurry in the foreground, or maybe we want to just brighten it up and go crazy with it. I don't know, wouldn't do that. But maybe just make it a little bit more green, you know, change the color or something a little bit. We could take that point color picker, choose that green, and then increase the saturation of that green, maybe push it more towards a emerald Irish green versus a brown. Or we can make it feel more like a fall color day. And we can, there we go. We could just turn this into a fall foliage day compared to the pre fall, which we were there in November. So I was about to turn these colors yellow. Just amazing stuff. I wouldn't be able to go in there and mask every individual leaf there like we did there with that landscape mask. Just really cool stuff with masking and being able to detect things in your photo. Again, in the light room class, I go through all of these. But this is available both in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. All right, thanks so much for watching, and we will see you in another lesson. 11. Remove Objects & Distractions in Lightroom with AI: In this demo, I'm going to show you how to remove distractions right within Lightroom. So, in Lightroom we're Lightroom Classic. If you go to the remove tool, it used to be the healing brush tool. We have a bunch of options for sort of manually doing this and automatically. Let me jump to the automatic distraction removal tab down here. If, for example, this photo standing in front of the Louvre in Paris, if I drop down the people drop down, it's going to detect people in your photo, and it does it in a way of the background people. And you can simply click Remove, and it's going to process and remove those people. Of course, depending on how detailed and complicated the photo is and the background is, it might not do the best job, and you might be able to get away better by doing it manually up here with, like, a brush. However, this quick distraction removal is Look at that. We were there standing in front of the love by ourself. No one was there. That's amazing. You see two other options. We have reflections and dust. Reflections, that's going to be more like if you are taking a photo, and there happens to be a mirror or a window where it can see you in the mirror, it's going to remove that. It's not going to do this where you can remove a reflection of, like, a subject in the water. That's not what that reflection tool does. It's if you are photographing something through glass. Now, speaking of this photo, though, there's a lot of dust and grain. There's weird stuff going on because my sensor or lens is not perfectly clean, and so it has this dust removal. So if you drop that down and click Apply, it's going to process and apply an automatic dust removal feature, which is, again, so much faster than doing it manually with a healing brush or a clone tool. You can turn this on and off or click this button here to visualize the spots, and you can see the ones that have been removed. And this is just a cool feature, too, to just look and see, is there something going on with your sensor, with your camera? I have no clue what that big circle is up there. There's something going on with my camera or lens. I don't know if that was in the photo itself, but you can just see all the little spots that were removed, which is pretty cool. So that's a quick way to remove dust from your photos. Let's go ahead and use the People feature because I'm going to compare using another tool with this photo to see how good of a job it does at removing and then also replacing it with its generative AI recreation of this fence, which Geez, Louise, it is incredible. Now, I can see a couple of things that have changed that have changed the authenticity of this photo. If I zoom in here, pay attention here, there's something in there before it removed it. And actually, let's go ahead and reset this and let's go ahead and detect the people. I actually detected a person here, and I'm going to trash that because I don't want to remove that. And then click Remove and it would do a better job. Now, there's something selected here as well. It detected a person here, which there was not, but it does a better job at recreating what's here. But again, it's not perfect. So that's how you can automatically remove people, does a pretty good job. But what if you want to manually do it so you have more control? You can do that up here with the remove tool. Here we have the removed brush before we had the heel and the clone tool, which are still handy. And again, I go through these in the full light room class. But basically, I can go in here and now I can select our people, for example. There, it's going to do a quick removal. Now, the way that it does it without generative AI is it's taking details from the rest of the photo and trying to rebuild it based off of what it sees outside the boundary of the selection. It does an okay job, but I want to change this to a generative remove. And so now it's going to process it with generative AI. Can see that does a much better job, and what I love is that it has these three variations, which for this photo, it's pretty similar the three variations, but you can see, even here, pay attention to the top of that post. We have one that just doesn't look as natural, and I think that one looks the best. Similarly, if we just go in here and check this generative AI box, and then we paint over our people, for example, and you can do multiple at a time, although I found that sometimes if you do all of the distraction at once and then click Remove, it has a tough time doing it properly and doing it sort of one little group of people or one distraction at a time, I think, does a better job. Boom. Just amazing. And then you can really fine tune, like, do I want to remove all these people back here, which weren't captured in the people down here? There was one person. I can adjust the brush size, boom, boom, boom, boom. There's a person right there. I guess I'll try that. You could adjust and add the brush afterwards, which gives us much more power than a lot of these other tools. And again, you can go through the variations, but does an amazing job. So let's just see the before and after before, after before, after with those people removed. Haven't removed these people yet, but we can go through remove that first one. Let's remove this guy here as well. I'm going to paint over here because there's shadows in there, and I want to make sure that's removed. That's just crazy, right? So here we have our After before, after. I did a little bit of an adjustment to the sky and stuff before as well. But removing distractions super, super impressive. Now, I will show you something that didn't work as well. Here, if we detect people in this photo, again, sitting in front of sacrikur it's going to be impossible to do that without other people. It does a decent job at making the selection of the people. But when I click Remove and it does it automatically for all of these people, it does some weird stuff. Like, see, this is supposed to be a fence right there. It removes that. And yeah, not a good job. So I would go in here and do that manually for this photo. I want to show you one more thing, and I've opened up a new photo because it's a good example of wanting to remove an object. I've added or checked on the detect Objects button because now I can kind of, like, paint over something, but not like perfectly. And then it's going to analyze and try to detect that object that I'm trying to select. And it does a pretty good job there. And now I can click and remove that. You might have to make a little bit of an adjustment with your brush as well. But here, it does a pretty good job at that. Let me go ahead and over that trash can. And again, it's sort of making a selection of the object and what it needs around it. So pretty good job. And even, like, what's amazing about that is that there was this boat behind it, and in one of these variations, it almost recreates the boat in the background, which is just, like, insane. And doing this is sort of the edge of where creativity and the use of AI is good versus, like, too much taking away from photography. It's on the edge, though, because we've always had or not always, but for many years, we've had the ability to use the clone stamp tool and to use the healing brush tool and all of these tools that we have available to us to do things like this, but it just took a lot more time and effort. And so AI is making that easy for us to remove distractions from a photo, which can make a more compelling and dynamic image. Which at the end of the day, it's up to you to decide if you're okay with that. Of course, there's going to be times where I think, removing certain things goes too far, and that's going to be a personal preference, and something we're going to grapple with time and time again. I think there is a difference in, like, creating something totally brand new versus just removing something from an image, but it is on that fence. And I'll let you decide where you find it to be too far. Right, thank you so much for watching. That's how to remove distractions in Lightroom Classic. And it's very similar in Lightroom, as well. We'll be going over some other tools using their built in features of removing distractions as well coming up in more demos. 12. Expand the Edges of Your Photos with AI in Photoshop: In this demo, I'm going to show you how to extend the edges of your photo using Photoshop. This is not a feature that we have in Lightroom yet. It might be something that we get. If you're not familiar with how Photoshop works, let me just show you a quick way to send a photo to Photoshop from Lightroom. Just right click and choose Edit in Photoshop. You can choose to make a copy, which I did so that I have the original version in Lightroom. And this is available if you have a Photoshop or an Adobe account. With this photo opened, you have this tool bar down here that has a lot of AI based features. But to extend the edges, you'll want to open up the crop tool here, this crop button, and then click and drag the edge of your photo to where you want it to expand. You can go up down any direction. And so say I want a little bit more negative space in this photo. Once you're happy with your new crop, click Generative Expand. You can give it a prompt. So say you want it to be something specific, you can type it in or just click Generate, and this will actually start to fill in that expansion with what AI creates, and it will base it off the rest of the photo, what's at the edge of the photo as well to try to create an image that well, just fits in. You get multiple options which you can get to in the Properties panel or just this button down here. And you can see that, I would say that this third one is not good because it has these boats in the water that are a little bit distracting. You can also see that the mountains in the background are not exactly what these mountains look like. This is at Santa Monica Beach. And so that's where we are again on the fence of what's authentic with AI and photography. I would say this second one does a pretty good job. You'll notice here is the Layers panel, and we have this new layer of Photoshop that has this edge, what's been created around the edge, and it's not in the original image. And so now we have this super wide image, a little bit more cinematic. And actually, the composition of this is pretty cool. It is a composition I couldn't have gotten naturally with the lenses that I had on that day, but pretty darn good. That is edge expansion in Adobe Photoshop. Are a couple other tools that do this, and I have another demo in this class. If you don't have an Adobe account, you'll see that there. Otherwise, we'll see you in another lesson. 13. Remove Objects & Distractions with AI in Photoshop: While I'm here in Photoshop, I figured I might as well just demo the remove tool, which is this little band aid tool, sort of like the healing brush, but now with some sparkles because it's generative AI. So, similar to what we saw in Lightroom, with this tool, we now have sort of a brush, which we can change the size up here. And we'll be able to paint over what we want to remove. But something that I am going to do first because the expansion that we did in the last lesson and original Photo are on two different layers. And so what we do with that removal tool will only happen to whatever layer we have selected. I'm actually going to merge these two layers by selecting both of them and choosing to command E. That's merge layers into one. Now what I can do again with my brush is I'm going to go ahead and brush over this. I really should have used a bigger brush for this. I'm going to choose that shadow as well because the shadow wouldn't go as far if that trash can wasn't there. Now, as soon as you let go of clicking, it's going to start to remove that. Now, it does have an option. I'm on the auto where it may use generative AI, it may not. If you wanted to not use generative AI, you can turn that off, which is cool because it's going to use the context of what's around it and what's in the image to remove things. You also have this fine distractions tool, which is cool because you have the people, and then you also have the wires option, which is really cool for removing wires in a photo. Here it has selected these two groups of people, as well as this one to remove. So this photo is a little different than the one we saw in the previous Lightroom lesson where it found the background people, not the main subjects. It's kind of harder for it to see what is the main subject and not. So I'm actually going to subtract using a subtraction brush, and I'm just going to subtract this selection. So it basically just makes a selection of the people, and then you click this checkmark to actually apply it. So maybe I want to remove that person in the background, maybe not. But let's just see what it does when you have that removed. Depending on what your photo is, it's going to find more distractions or less with that fine distractions button, and that does pretty good. Now notice what's happening, though, is that it's actually happening to the layer within Photoshop. It's burning those edits into this layer. So something that you might want to do is actually create a duplicate of this layer so you can drag that into this little plus button and then make your edits here that you want to remove so that you can always go back to your original edit. If you need to. I find that just using the brush and not using the fine distractions is a lot quicker. There's this little trash can here, just clicking, and as soon as you let go, it removes it. Let's remove this chair as well. That one's taking a little bit longer to remove. It's a little bit more complicated. But dang, that is pretty cool. Pretty cool photo before and after, cleaning it up a bit. That is how you remove distractions in Photoshop. I'll see you in another demo soon. 14. Remove Objects & Distractions with AI in Luminar Neo: In this demo, I'm going to show you how to remove distractions using Luminar Neo. I've imported some more travel photos, and in a couple of these, there are some distractions or things that would be cool to remove, like this temple that we saw. And there's some people here, and really what I was trying to do with this photo was highlight the negative space of this giant temple. And so I would love to remove some of these people, and I can do so by clicking the Gen Erase tool. Now have a little eraser, and you can just go in and select or brush over what you want to be erased. I find that it does do a better job if you aren't selecting everything at one time, but just, you know, similar things to erase. So I selected those two groups of people who are a little bit smaller in the frame. And then next, I'm going to go over here and you can see it does a freaking brilliant job. I'm going to go over here to this group of people and erase them as well, making sure I'm getting the shadow as well on the ground. Move, click race. And there you go. I did a decent job on that one. I might try to make a separate selection as well again for that. So let's go ahead and come in here. We're just going to say reset selection. I'm going to go in and select. And let's just go one at a time. First over the people at the top. We'll erase them. And then we'll go in and erase the guy at the bottom, and it does a better job when you do it this way, again, because it's just focused on sort of matching the pattern and the things that are going on around your selections and replacing them with Gen AI. And there you go. Dang. Look at that photo. You know, you see the before, after. It's pretty pretty dang, amazing. So that is how you use that Jen erase tool. Once you do make any changes, you'll see that it pops into these folders, which keeps it very organized, which is nice. Let's go ahead and try this one. I haven't tried this one yet. I love this photo. I do not like the railing that we have here, so I'm just going to paint over that railing. I'm going to try to do all of this at once and see what it comes up with. So this is going to work really good for things like wires, telephone wires, signs, distracting signs, even people in the background and things like that. But it might not work for the first time. So I'm showing you a couple examples. This one I haven't seen, but the previous one I did some test to make sure that it looked good and look at that. Amazing. Now, the benefit of using something like Photoshop to do this, which we've seen in a different demo, is that it gives you a preview of a few options. Here, we don't have options for changing what the generative AI is doing or filling that selection with. So you'll have to, you know, erase again to do it. So that's one reason I like Photoshop. However, the power of Luminar Neo tool is pretty amazing. All right, that is Gen EAs in Luminar Neo. 15. Edge Expansion in Luminar Neo: I really love this photo of me in Japan that my wife snapped on our trip to Osaka and Tokyo. However, I kind of want this to be a square photo for social media. Well, I can do that with Jen Expand. So choosing your photo and then selecting Jen Expand, I can then go in and basically create bigger crop for this photo and choose to expand. You can type in what you want or just click Expand, and it will try to match what is in the photo. If it doesn't do a good job or if you're looking for something super specific, then you might want to prompt it with some more details. And there you can see that it did an expansion. And from here, we can actually continue to expand if we want. Now, let's go back, and I'm going to type in my prompt. Just simply going to put buildings from a street in Osaka Japan. Now, I do that because I don't speak Japanese. I don't read that writing, but my hope is that if it is adding any text or expanding the signage, then it's matching the language that it's in. It's matching the style of streets in Osaka that it's basing its generation on and things like that. So let's see what this new expansion looks like. And here we have it. So here's another photo. I think I actually like this one better. I don't know if it's totally from the prompt, or if it's just this second one, I think it just looks a little bit more natural. Now, something I would probably go in myself and do is now take this photo, blur out those sides because they're a bit it does the focus feels pretty natural, like the fall off. However, I think those edges would be a little bit more out of focus in a natural photo. And so now you have your photo. Looks pretty dang amazing. From here, you could edit it within Luminar Neo with presets or they have a ton of editing features which we haven't done yet. They've got some AI ones like enhancing and all kinds of other things. Or you can export it and edit it in your other editing app of choice. Alright, so that is generative Expand right within Luminar Neo. 16. Retouching Portraits with AI in AfterShoot: In this demo, I'm going to be looking at AfterShoot retouching features. So if you import a folder or some photos and then click on retouch, you'll get to all of the retouching options. The way that it works in AfterShoot is a bit more manual. They have all of these sliders for things that you can change, for example, brightening and whitening teeth. It does take a moment to do all of these things. Face brightening, smoothing. I'm picking on my brother in law. By the way, this is Brian. You seen him in a couple of writing and storytelling classes that we've done. You can remove blemishes, like freckles. Freckles are not a blemish, but if you do want to get rid of freckles and spots, any acne, you can adjust that. That smooths that out. You can add a bit of eye brightening, reducing the bags under eyes, and you can do all of this manually. However, you can also pick some presets. So under presets, you can choose one such as, let's go ahead and choose Face Pop. That's going to actually apply some of these effects onto all of the faces in your photo. Here we just have one. You can adjust the strength of this going left and right, you can see it smooths a bit of the skin as well. And does a pretty good quick job at that. I like that sort of quick preset. You can remove hair flyaways, which is super helpful if you get little hairs that are, you know, flying away. Especially with people with longer hair, that's going to be helpful wrinkles. You want to remove wrinkles, smile lines. Poor Brian, we're going to go crazy and just remove all of those naturally beautifully looking lines in your cheeks and your forehead make you look a couple years younger. So, of course, with any retouching of portraits, it's up to you and your subjects to actually make the choice to do things like removing wrinkles and things like that. They have these other ones as well. So let's just show you a couple of these. We got P headshots. I do not know about that one. That looks way too fake for me. So maybe bringing down that strength might help, but I feel like that looked pretty. I mean, old school pro let's do glamour finish, see what that looks like for Brian. Ah, so glamorous. And lastly, let's just see this face cleanup. That one's actually pretty good. I would probably say that's a good sort of starting point to do it automatically. Now, all of this to say that this photo should be edited before doing retouching. That's the process you want to do. And right now in AfterShoot and maybe by the time you're watching this, you cannot actually edit a photo and then retouch. Seems kind of silly, but that's just not working in AfterShoot yet. When you try to do that, then it will give you an error message and say, they're working on that. So you might need to edit in Lightroom or you're editing app of choice and then bring in the photo, even if it's a raw photo, DNG file or an exported raw file or JPEG, you can bring it into AfterShoot and do your final retouches here with these presets. So couple extra steps, but does a decent job at making it easy, especially using those presets. All right, thanks so much for watching this demo, and we'll see you in another one. 17. AI-Powered Photo Restoration with Luminar Neo: Here's a quick demo of the Photo restoration feature in Luminar Neo. Once you've added photos, which I've found a few examples of some photos that need restoration from unsplash.com and some of the Library of Congress images, you can see all of the different tools that we have on the right hand side, and I'm going to click Restoration. I'm going to choose one of these photos to restore, and you can choose if you want full, if you want colorization or removing scratches, I'm going to choose full and click Restore. Once it has finished, it pops up here. You can see that it did a decent job trying to restore this photo. It colorized it as well. It had this weird, sort of, I think it was like a double exposure that I think is causing it to look kind of funky, so not a perfect job. So you can see, here's the original, here's the restoration. Let's go ahead and use this one as an example. We're going to just drag and drop that one down there as well. And let's just do a scratches restore and not colorization to see how that one does. And there you can see this one edited without the scratches. So before, the after there, pretty darn good. Let's do one more. So this one here, which doesn't have a weird sort of double exposure thing going on. So we're going to do a full restoration of this photo. This one's difficult because it's a little bit blurry. So Luminar Neo is going to do a bit of sharpening and regeneration to make it a sharp image, get rid of all of these dust and scratches, as well. And there we have it pretty darn. Good job. We can see the original one here with the post one there. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that would take hours to do, maybe if you were really good in ten, 20 minutes in Photoshop, and you would get a very similar result. Of course, it's not going to be 1,000% perfect every time. And maybe sometimes you won't be able to do a full restoration with color, but maybe just removing the scratches is going to be enough for you. And sometimes it just might end up looking a little weird, so it just doesn't work. But the power of it is pretty darn good, and it's amazing what you can do with a photo that started like this and then ends like this. Pretty powerful stuff coming from Luminar Neo with their restoration feature. 18. How to Use AI for Photo Quality Enhancements: Welcome to this new section of the AI for photography course. And this one we're covering image quality enhancement. This is similar to photo editing, but I put it in this separate section because really what this is about is things like noise reduction, sharpening your photos, upscaling, and fixing focus. These are ways to just improve the actual quality of your photo itself using an AI tool. So why is this exciting to me as a photographer? I can use an older camera, a cheaper model, a lens that's not the most expensive and fanciest, and still get super high quality photos. But if they're not as quality as I want them, I can upscale them, so increase the actual resolution. I can denoise the noise in the photo. So with that smaller crop sensor camera when you're trying to get that photo when it's a little darker or inside, but you just end up with that noise and grain in there, you can remove that easier now than ever with AI tools. And then there's tools that do this along with sharpening your photos to get them crisper, get those details and make them pop. But also not just doing that subtle sharpening, but also fixing focus. So if the focus is off, it can actually regenerate the image and sharpen it up in a pretty good way. Now, it doesn't work all the time, but there's some tools that are getting better and better. And speaking of tools, there's a lot of them. Still, within Lightroom, we got some tools built in. Imagine Luminar Neo, Topaz, Gigapixel AI, Photo Room, Photo eraser, HipHop Photo P. That is a name for a tool. So I'm going to be covering demos for a lot of these tools out there, and I don't want to be a broken record, but these tools change all the time. New features are coming out all the time. So, if you don't have access to one of these tools, then there's other ones that might do the same thing. There's the big standard tools like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop that are getting new features all of the time. So by the time you're watching this, who knows exactly what tools are going to be the best for these different uses. But right now, I'm going to just dive into some of these because they're pretty powerful and also compare and contrast how well they do, for example, de noising, we'll dive into the demos and see which ones work the best for our photos. So excited to dive in and I'll see you in those demos. Bye. 19. AI-Powered Noise Reduction in Lightroom: This demo, I'll show you how to use the denoise feature, which is now AI powered in Lightroom. So here we have this photo of a bird I'll be using for the other demos as well so we can compare and contrast at the end. And you can see that it has quite a bit of noise in the background. So in your develop tab, under detail, there's this denoise checkbox, and I've already processed it, but it will take a minute to actually process if it hasn't been processed yet. Really see if we zoom in. I'm using the Command button on my mac, clicking and dragging. In. You can see if I turn this preview on and off how much noise has actually been removed. Now, when I do this, you'll notice that another checkbox is on raw details. So if I turn off denoise, I can actually just turn on raw details. And what this is going to do is try to preserve the details and sharpen up things just ever so slightly in your image. This is different than what super resolution is where you're actually upscaling, and we'll go over that in a second in a future demo in this section. But you can see with the denoise, the raw details is already on because it is trying to get rid of that noise and maintain the details. You still have your manual noise reduction here if you want to do it manually and fine tune things like luminance and color details. All of that I cover in my light room class. But here I just really wanted to show you this denoise lighter, which is AI powered. So check that out. I'm going to be going over the other tools, and then we'll compare and contrast which one I like the best and the results after we've done a few of these demos. 20. AI-Powered Noise Reduction with Luminar Neo: In Luminar Neo, removing noise is super easy. If you have a photo open in the Edit tab, here's a photo of a bird that you can see that does have a decent amount of noise in the background. It was shot in the morning low light. Under image quality on the right hand side, you have the noiseless feature. Here it has three options and then a bunch of customizations down below, starting with the middle, it will remove a bunch of that noise. And while it does that, I can talk about the luminosity, color denoise. These are things that you can play around with to move more noise, less noise, those colored pixels versus the black and white sort of pixels. And you can see already Zoomed in, it does a pretty good job. I like that you can easily preview this on and off. So it gets rid of a lot of that color noise that you see up here in the blacks back there. I might go in and try Let's just actually click on the high option and see what that looks like. Pretty good, pretty good. Let's go in and just go crazy and just drag those up to 100 to see what it can do, because there is still a little bit of noise in the background that I'm seeing I mean, overall, before and after, it's a pretty good job. Let's look at a different image. Here's one standing outside the Louvre. Here you can see a ton of noise in the sky as well. So again, going to noiseless, starting with the middle settings, and there you can really see that noise in the sky. Let me just zoom in so you can really see that noise there and then removed. We can switch over to high and see how much that does, even more noise removed. And I mean, I'm zoomed in here like a crazy amount. But when we are zoomed out, see that noise? Boom, removed. And of course, you can play around with the details and sharpness there to preserve that if you're losing. But when you're zoomed out, this is pretty amazing. So I would say Luminar Neo does a really good job at noise reduction, especially because you have the options to manually control some of these, similar to what we saw in Lightroom. Alright, we'll see you in the next lessons, and at the end, I'll be doing comparison of the tools that I've gone over and talk about which one I like the best. 21. AI-Powered Noise Reduction with HitPaw Fotorpea: Alright, here we are in HitPaw Photo P. Definitely my favorite name for an app. I'm going to go into detail recovery, and then I'm going to drag my photo here, and I'm going to use the same photos so we can compare and contrast. Under enhancements, we have the denoise feature. They have three different models that they can use creative denoise, realistic denoise and raw denoise. Raw denoise is great, especially if you are uploading and using a raw file. To actually activate this or process it, click the preview button here. What I like about hip hop Photo P is that it has this sort of double view where you can just really easily see the before and after at the same time and kind of contrast. You can just click and drag around the image. You can see here it's just much easier to see the before image and all that noise that's in the background of this photo, not very sharp. This was shot with a crop sensor camera. And again, this is why these tools are amazing is because even with a crop sensor camera that doesn't have the best biggest latest sensor. It does a really good job at reducing that noise, and then combining that with sharpening, which we'll go over in a future lesson and upscaling, it creates incredible, incredible photo. So here you can see over on the right hand side, all that noise that's been removed. I mean, I'll zoom in really far, and you can see before on the left, after on the right. Can try these different models. The creative denoise is going to do a bit more of a generative AI to recreate things like textures, sharpening and things like that. I would stick with the realistic or the raw denoise depending on your photo file. If you have raw files, use the raw denoise. If you have a JPEG file, you can choose the realistic denoise. But play around with it. The difference here is that we don't have a slider in terms of the fine tuning everything, such as the luminosity or the color noise that you're removing. But you still have a pretty solid job that maintains the integrity of this photo, as you can see here. You can also change the view here to do this sort of cool wipe before and after, which is pretty cool. Alright, that is Hip hop Photo P's AID noise, pretty solid job. 22. Which AI Tool Reduces Noise the Best?: So which tool that I use did denoising the best? I've been staring at these photos for quite a while, and I have the three of them. We have the Lightroom one. We have the Luminar Neo version, and we have the HitPaw Photo P one as well. And at the end of the day, I do think the Lightroom one wins out because it preserves a lot of the details and other things that I wasn't really aware of what was going on when I was using these tools. Here's Luminar Neo again. HitPaw, let me zoom out and show you. These are exported JPEG images. So here you can see what's going on. These are the JPEG images. Now, here we see Lightroom. Here we see Luminar Neo, and here we have a screenshot of hip hop photops. I like Luminar Neo the least, actually. There's a little bit of muddiness going on in the background in terms of the noise, but also the exposures look kind of funky. Lightroom one still preserves a lot of the details in the background, even though it's blurred out, just that sort of shadows in the background. As does Hip ha Photo orps, although I think HitPaw adds a little bit too much contrast or some sort of sharpening or something that's going on. And really, any of these tools do an amazing job compared to what we had before with manual noise reduction. Here we have our original file. This file is not terrible. There's other files that you could probably use with a lot more noise that any of these tools would do an amazing job. But for just that little bit of noise reduction, really any of these would work, but I prefer light room. I did like Hip hop Photo P's sort of double view over here. It has a nice slider that makes it super easy to look at the before and after. Lightroom does have a similar view if you click this little view button down here, and from here, you can zoom in, and you could actually just drag the photo from left to right and kind of see the before and after. You could change the view, as well just to get that before and after contra. So it's available in Lightroom, as well. I just like how it pops up and is super accessible in Hip hop Photo P. But for now, I'm going to be sticking with Lightroom. Alright, we'll see you in another demo. 23. AI-Powered Upscaling with Lightroom Classic: In this demo, we're going to look at Super resolution in Lightroom. This is the way of upscaling, increasing the actual resolution of my file. In Lightroom, you can press the i button to bring up your resolution. So this photo is pretty big already. 6,200 pixels wide, about but for photography like this, where I'm using a 100 to 400 millimeter lens on a crop sensor camera, I'm able to get a decent photo of this hummingbird, but they are so small that to actually crop in, get this hummingbird to fill the frame, it's really, really hard to do that out in nature. So having something like the super resolution tool where we can increase the resolution, allows us to crop in preserving those details without losing quality, which just helps us with whether we're printing out things or even if we're posting online, but especially when we're zooming in and cropping. And so let's go ahead and now that that's process, let's do a crop. Let's do a square crop right over our hummingbird. Say, we want to post this on social media, but I mean, I like sort of the negative space in the photo, but let's just crop in here for now just to see these details. You can see sort of a preview of this here in this window. You can click that box to kind of move it around right around that eye or the feathers is kind of nice. And then I can preview this on and off with this button here. You don't see a lot of change in the preview of this or just in the window over here. However, once you export, you'll be able to see the change in how big you can actually export. Without that crop, I can see that the actual resolution of this file is 12480 by 8,320, so effectively doubling the resolution of this image. Going to go over some of the other AI tools, and then like we did with denoise, we will compare and contrast at the end. I'm not doing any other edits to these photos so that we can just compare strictly the resolution upscaling features without any added denoising or other edits to them to see which ones look best. Alright, so you in those tutorials. 24. AI-Powered Upscaling with Luminar Neo: Now I'm in Luminar Neo for this demo on their upscale tool. So over here on the right hand side, if you have a photo selected in your catalog, click under enhancement Tools Upscale. We're going to drag a photo into there, and here you can choose whether to double four x or even depending on the photo, you can six X your photos. Then just click Upscale. And now we have upscaled this four X. So the actual resolution of this is 24,000 pixels wide. I actually don't know when you would need that, but you can see that if I zoom in here, the details are quite preserved with this and zoomed out, it looks really good. I'm going to go back, and I'm going to just upscale it by two X so that I can compare directly with the Lightroom option, which only had that two X upscaling. But otherwise, this looks really solid. I'm going to move on to the other tools in the next demo and then we'll compare and contrast the final results at the very end. 25. AI-Powered Upscaling with HitPaw FotorPea: Here I am in Hip PA Photo P, and I'm going to test out the image upscale option for you, so I'm going to click that. And then I'm going to use a JPEG, but unscaled rat unedited version of this photo because you can only use JPEG files here in HIPPA Photo P. It automatically starts to enhance it. Now, if you were in the editing mode, you can find this under AI upscale over here. And you have the scale multiplier, two x, four x, and even ex. You also have several different models of upscaling over here on the right C. So I'm going to just zoom in, and we can see that the details are pretty similar for the upscaled version. We're still seeing that noise and grain in the background, but that's okay. All we're really caring about is the resolution and maintaining that quality. I could even see on the little stick or branch that this hummingbird was on that the details there are a bit sharper. So that's looking good. Now, I'm actually going to switch the model from generative to high fidelity because this model because this photo already has a lot of nice details in it, and that should give us a bit of a higher quality result for a photo that already has nice details. That high fidelity model has processed, and it looks pretty good. It does add a bit of noise reduction as well, which I don't necessarily mind, but the other tools that I've tested out seem to maintain the integrity of the original photo a bit better. Now, I'm going to go ahead and save this photo and then we'll compare and contrast with the other models in an upcoming lesson. 26. AI-Powered Upscaling Online with Upscale.Media: Alright, because I was curious, I wanted to try one online based image upscaler. So I found upscale dot Media. That's the actual website name, and I'm going to test it out for you to see if one of these web based apps might be beneficial to try. If you don't want to download an app, pay for an app. Let's see how it does. So I've uploaded the raw unedited file. Actually, it's not a raw file. It's just unedited full quality JPEG version of that hummingbird that we've been working with. Processing in the background. And the reason I wanted to just test this tool out is because there are new tools coming out all the time that do specific things. It's nice to have it all built into one tool, but sometimes one tool over here does a decent job at upscaling, where another one does better denoising. And so you might want to play around with different options. Alright, so now we have the AI upscale media's version. It's kind of cool. It previews them and you can hover over with your mouse and see the original and the AI upscale. It has an option to change the upscale version or amount, as well as enhance the quality of the image, which is going to do things like sharpening, removing background noise, that kind of thing. I don't want to do that for this comparison, so I'm just going to download this image, and then I'll be better able to compare and contrast with our other tools in an upcoming lesson. Thanks for watching. That's upscale dot media's Upscale Tool. 27. AI-Powered Upscaling with Lightroom Powered by Topaz Labs' Gigapixel AI: Here we are in Lightroom, not Lightroom Classic, because I want to show you a really cool update this year if you have the latest version in the beginning of 2026. So if you're watching this afterwards, which you are, then you'll have this with any version of Lightroom Classic yet for some reason. But they have built into this the Topaz Labs generative upscale. So this is powered by Topaz Labs, Gigapixel AI, and you find it if you have a Photo open by going up to Photo generative upscale. Here you have options. You can upscale by two times or a four times upscale and then click upscale.'s cool about this is that Lightroom realized that they don't build all the best tools. Adobe doesn't so they went out and they've actually partnered with Topaz Labs to bring their super powerful upscaling tool right within Lightroom. Of course, you need a Lightroom membership to use it or an Adobe membership. It's processing up in the top left. All right, so now it has been processed, and it took me a second to understand what went on because I opened up my info tab with my I keyboard shortcut, and I still saw the same settings. However, what happens is, after it upscales, it actually creates a copy of it and you'll find it in your photos. So it'll be your latest photo and it'll be a new DNG raw file. And you can see, now the settings up here, 12,000 pixels. That's incredible. 103 megabytes. That is massive. So this is a super powerful tool built into Lightroom. I'm not sure if it'll be in Lightroom Classic, but if it does, it might end up in that photo Tab, but time will tell. For now, though, you can do it right within Lightroom. And in the next lessons, I'm going to go over some of the other non Lightroom tools for upscaling, and then following that, we'll compare and contrast the final results of all of these images. 28. Which AI Tool is Best at Upscaling Your Photo's Resolution?: So here we go. We've got our original file plus five other versions of upscaling. And you tell me, can you tell a difference? I know this is going to be impossible, actually, for you to see watching this video back, which has been screen recorded and compressed and playing online. So I think it's going to be tough, but let me walk through what I am seeing. Up in the top left, we have our original photo at the original resolution, but all zoomed in to about the same amount. Working clockwise, we have the Lightroom. This is the Lightroom Gigapixel, the Lightroom Cloud based Gigapixel upscale. Here is the Lightroom Classic super Zoom on the right. Down below, we have the HitPaw upscale. In the middle at the bottom, we have that online tool, the free one upscale dot Media, and down in the bottom left, we have the Luminar Neo upscaling. Now, I can see a little bit of a difference. I promise I swear I can see it. I see a little bit of a difference in this raw versus some of these other tools. You'll also see that some of them are doing some extra processing. Like the Gigapixel within Lightroom Cloud is denoising, as is the hit Pot upscale in the bottom right. And similar to what we've seen with the denoise, the hip pop upscale also adds a little bit of, like, contrast, so the colors and things pop a bit more I think to the naked eye, it almost looks better, but there is some weird stuff going on, and it's not preserving that natural authentic detail of the original photo. The upscale media one, I would say is probably my least favorite in terms of just the quality. And there's again, some weird, sort of, like, blurriness going on certain parts of the image. I mean, I can see that this photo is not perfectly sharp anyways, and we have not added any sharpness or any of those detail enhancements that these tools have. So this is really just based off of the resolution of the photo and the quality that you can tell and see when you're zoomed in. And the Luminar Neo actually does a pretty good job, as well. Say that. Also the Lightroom Gigapixel one, you lose a bit of color. Like, if you're looking at the original and then also just the regular Lightroom one, you have a bit more color in here. And of course, all of that can be tweaked and changed with other editing features and edits. But in terms of just the upscaling and what's happening, gosh, I don't know if I could pick a favorite. I would say probably in terms of the details itself, I actually still really like the super Zoom. That's the basic Lightroom Classic option, which is also in Lightroom under your details panel. And I think because it just preserves the original photo details a bit better, it's not doing denoising or things that I would rather do manually myself with another tool. But really, all of these work pretty good. And in terms of the point of upscaling, if you are really wanting to zoom in on a photo, crop in, print it out super big, any of these tools are going to be pretty good. All right, thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you in another tutorial. 29. Fix Focus with HitPaw FotorPea: This demo, you're going to learn how to sharpen up faces using the tool called HitPaw. So this tool has a lot of different features. We haven't gone over all of these in this course, but you can see that it has things like Photo restoration. However, for actually focusing up a photo, we are going to use the face restoration feature. So if you click on that and then you choose the photo that you want to work with, I'm going to again work with the same photo of me and my daughter. So we can kind of compare and contrast the results. See that this tool has a lot more options. So here it has checked on face restoration, and then underneath it has soft V one, soft V two, realistic and sharp. I'm going to turn off AI upscaling, which I don't need right now. It also has a face selection tool, which is cool because now we can select the ones that we want to actually apply this to. So first, let's go ahead and see what soft V one does. So click Preview. It's going to process it in the Cloud. And already, I can tell you that this tool has more advanced features compared to some of the other ones, which I really like being able to change sort of the amount and the strength of the focusing is nice. Some of these still do a bit of over processing, though. So once it's done processing, you can see that it did a pretty good job at focusing up. It still has that sort of weird AI generation look to it. That's why I'm going to choose the realistic option, and I'll show you again if I click Preview what that looks like. You'll notice, though, for realistic, we have a strength option here, medium high, low. I'm going to tell you up front that I'm going to select low because still medium and high look a bit over processed for my preference. And here we have the strength at medium and that look, and it looks like it actually processed my face as well. I think that don't know why it did it for both of us, but it did end up processing for both of us using that model. I'm going to change it to o right now to show you what that looks like. And while I'm being picky with how much this looks like GNAI and how natural it looks, if you're in a pinch and you get something like this and you're doing family photos, you might not want to take a photo that is completely AI generated with like that soft V one and sending it to a client. However, the realistic low is the one that I think looks the best. And I think you can get away with. And actually, for some reason, now we're back to pretty much unedited my face. I think it did a decent job at that. If you were in a pinch and you really wanting to edit this photo, you might want to export this photo and then actually take it into something like a Photoshop, and you could even make sure that you're blending it together with the original image better, maybe even softening it up a little bit more because it does not just sharpening, but, like, the skin looks like super, super soft. And so maybe somehow blending that in might look better. Still, look at that. Pretty amazing job. So that is HitPaw Photo P's face Restoration, which is a great way to quickly sharpen up something that is out of focus in your photos. Thanks for watching. 30. Fix Focus with PhotoEraser: The website Photo eraser dot app is another one where you can quickly remove objects, but you can also use it to focus things that are slightly out of focus. Upload an image, it's going to open up a very basic editing app, and here you can use the eraser, expander, remove background, sky replacement. I'm going to use the enhancer because it's going to actually focus things. So it's kind of tricky because it's not called focus or Unblur or thing like that. But just with that enhancer, it's going to actually focus up that image of my daughter, who was a little out of focus in this photo. So here you can see the before and after before, after, before, after. Now, you can tell that it's doing a little bit of Gen AI work, my eyes change a little bit. So it might be something that you want to apply, go back, ply again. But still, a pretty good job. Now to actually download this, you will have to have a subscription. It's $0.99 for the first week or about 25 bucks a month, which is quite expensive for a tool like this. However, if you are really in a pinch and need a tool that can help you sharpen up photos, then this might be one that you can easily use online from anywhere. All right, that's Photo eraser for fixing focus in your photos. 31. Fix Focus with Topaz Labs Unblur Tool: Have you ever taken a photo where something or someone is out of focus? Maybe your aperture was too shallow and one person's face was blurry, but the other was maybe sharp or even a little bit off? Well, with Topaz Labs Unblur, you can sharpen that up with the click of a button. That's what this tutorial is all about. Topaz Labs has a pretty powerful Unblur feature. So if you go to their website and go to Cloud Apps Unblur, you can actually start for free. I'm going to go ahead and upload this photo, which is a photo that I love of me and my daughter, but her face is a little bit blurry, just out of focus. That super shallow depth of field is totally making her look out of focus. So when you upload, it's going to give you the options to unblur based off of something that is like a slightly missed focus, motion blur or out of focus. She is on the edge. I would say she is missed focus. I'm slightly out of focus. I'm going to go ahead and click Render using this model, and it's going to upload and process in the Cloud. And check it out. It has done a pretty amazing job at recreating and focusing my daughter. Now, it still has a little bit of that AI generation quality to it. I'd probably decrease the sharpening and de noising of this just so that it doesn't look so soft. It looks like it's a bit over processed. For my face, it looks somewhat more natural. But even if it isn't perfect, it's a pretty darn good job. Let's go ahead and look at what this would look like if we decrease our sharpening. And also, let's just change this to soft focus. And here we have that result, which is, I would say, actually pretty similar, but it is a little bit more natural. These tools are just getting better and better every day, and that is the Unblur tool in Topaz Labs. 32. How to Use AI for Photo Importing, Culling, Organization & Management: This section, I'll be covering how you can use AI to help with photo management. We already talked about culling, which is more of the importing aspect, that process of importing and getting selects and how that can be improved with AI features. In this section, I'm more talking about things like keyword suggestion and tagging, keyword searched, and facial recognition. So this is more how you find photos after the fact. Google Photos and just Apple Photos. And I'll give you some tips and tricks on how to quickly find photos faster than ever because this is where the power of AI can shine, where AI or your computer, your phone can detect a photo that is sunny, a photo of snow, a photo of your face, a photo of a family member's face. And you can basically search and organize through those keywords or those key features to quickly find your photos. Super helpful, super simple, and I'll be going over those in demos coming up. I'll see you. 33. Quickly Organize & Find Photos in Apple Photos: Here's a really quick demo. I'm on my iPhone. If you have an Android, though, the Android Photos app does a very similar thing where now we have the power of the AI that can detect things in your photos, making it super easy to search. So I'm just in my library. If I type the little magnifying glass to search, I can now search for pretty much anything. I can search for bird, and it's going to pull up all the photos of birds. I can search for Disneyland. And it's going to find photos that it recognizes from Disneyland. I can search for buildings. And this is just a very simplistic use of search. But because of the power of AI, we now have a way to find photos in a much more powerful search option. Here's all the pictures of me. I mean, this literally comes in handy, though, because I play board games with my kids, and sometimes we're stuck in the middle of a board game, and I take a picture of where we're at. And so I have to save it like this so that I can see, Okay, who was playing which character? How many lives did they have? What did the board setup look like? And instead of just scrolling through all of my photos, I can literally search for that board game text, and it will actually pull up photos that have board games in it. Super, super powerful. Now, the other thing that is cool is it automatically creates collection one that I think is the most powerful is the people and pets. So now it automatically face detects different people. So let's pick me, for example. Again, it's going to pull up all the photos that it has of me. It has all the different people that you've taken photos of Will, there's Will, all the photos with Will in them, which is pretty cool if I want to just quickly be able to find photos of my friends, family right here in my photos. So super powerful search powered by AI even has, like, group photos, for example, me and one other person. I can find all the photos of just me and my wife, for example. So here I have my wife, all the photos of me and her, which is pretty cool to see. Alright, that is the iPhone's photo library and how to use some of the AI powered search features right within it. 34. Quickly Organize & Find Photos in Google Photo: In this demo, I'm going to show you how to use Google Photos, powerful AI based search features and categories, similar to what we saw with the iPhone, and this is on desktop, but if you have the Photos app, it'll sync your photos in Google Photos to your desktop. And that's what I have. And so you have all these powerful search features. So the latest photos that have been uploaded have been from Disneyland, but we can search for pretty much anything. So let's search for baseball. I want to find any photos related to playing baseball, it's going to bring up those photos for the most part. Now, it's not 100% perfect, but it's I would say 98% accurate. Again, if I want to look up photos of my birds, I can find all There I am. Then I can find all the photos of my birds. You could search anything. You search locations. Let's look up Big Sur California and look at that. It brings up all the photos that it thinks are from Big Sur, which Geez Louise, it does a pretty amazing job. So saving us time by just populating photos, from searches is pretty powerful. You see the people there. You can search for people up here or you can go over on your left hand tab. You can search for people and pets. It's going to bring up all of the different people that it has Auto detected. It had a couple of different versions of me, but here it brings up the photos of me that it detects, which is pretty cool. Oh, there's my haircut photo. That's the one I show the barber. All the photos where I am in it, which is pretty darn cool. It even has all of our cats photos. All the photos of our cat chalet so lots of powerful ways to search through your photos and find the ones that are most meaningful, most special or just that very specific photo that you forgot where it was, but you need to find it. For example, Grandpa feeding baby. Here it has. All the photos where it looks like Grandpa is feeding a baby or related, and sure enough, here's the photo that I wanted to find that popped up of Lolo feeding our daughter when she was a baby. Powerful stuff. You can get creative with it, and it does a pretty good job at finding the exact photos that you were trying to find. Thanks so much for watching this lesson, and I will see you in another tutorial. 35. How to Use AI for Planning Your Next Photography Shoot: Welcome to this new section on planning and inspiration. How can AI help before you even go on a shoot? So we're stepping away from the actual photo editing and working with your photos aspect of photography. And now we're moving towards some ways that AI can help you in the planning, the preparation, and even after taking your photos. In this section, it's all about how these tools can help you plan your photo shoots. For example, Photo spot discovery. If you're like me, you've probably spent quite a bit of time either on Google Maps or just on Google searching for photo spots in your area. It's one of my favorite things to do when I travel. I'll look up and see what spots are out there. I'll use social media. I'll go on Instagram and I'll location tags or hash tags for specific spots, and I'll try to discover, you know, key viewing points or things that other people like to take photos of, which are usually fun to go out and try to capture myself. And that's all great. But now with AI, you have this powerful search engine that can help with this process. So finding spots, whether that's in your own yard for inspiration, or if you are doing things like a family photo shoot and you're looking for a location, maybe you're going and traveling to somewhere that you've never been before, but you want to find the spots that are local to that family or that couple or wherever, whoever it is that you're taking photos of, these tools can help you find those spots. And I'll be walking through the prompts and showing you how to do this myself in the demos. General photo shoot planning. So whether that's coming up with, like, a timeline, a schedule, coming up with a shot list, which is one of my other ideas here, coming up with inspiration for types of shots that you might want to get, all of this can be done with these tools. Researching new photographers. So this is more about just getting inspiration. I found is that the algorithm, while powerful on some of these social media platforms, they have one, gone away from being a photography centric platform. Like, I'm talking about Instagram, but most of these platforms, there's no photospecific social media platform anymore. That is super, super popular anyways. And so finding inspiration can kind of be difficult because the algorithm doesn't want to show you inspiring photographers. They only want to show you whatever the thing is that's getting the most engagement, which is usually things that are most controversial, just getting likes and dislikes. So for now, this is something that using a tool like ChatGPT you can do, finding new interesting photographers and diving deeper than you can by just searching on Google, where if you type in inspiring photographer, it's going to show the same person, the same thing. But with AI search engines like HachiBT, Gemini, Claude, you can actually dive deeper and say, I want to find, you know, a street photographer in Japan that does black and white photography. Boom, it's going to give you some examples. You can dive deeper and say, make it someone who shot photos in the 1970s. Boom, a female photographer, boom, it's going to help you find these answers way more powerfully and quicker than you would be able to do searching through social media or even on Google. And then reverse-prompting. So what I mean by this is that if you're like me, sometimes it's hard to get inspired to get out there and take photos or you just don't know what to take photos of. And I've done a lot of work trying to make photography fun for me, for my students and followers, through things like our Photo Dash challenge series, through our weekly challenges that we do in the photography and friends community. But using a tool like ChatGPT, you can actually have it prompt you, have it give you ideas for what to take photos of. And again, it's powerful enough so that if you give it more context, if you tell it where you're going to be taking photos of, what time you're going to be taking photos, it can tailor either a challenge or a prompt for you to that place, to that time. And so super powerful, super fun. Like I said, we're going to be going over these tools, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. I added a question mark because these tools are always changing. New ones are coming out, but they all work very similarly. And so if I'm using ChatGPT, you can do the same thing in Gemini and Claude in whatever tool that you're using now or in the future. All right, let's dive into the demo. 36. Researching Photo Locations with ChatGPT: In this demo, I'm going to show you how to use an AI tool like ChatGPT to help you research photography locations. Typically, what I would do in the past is search and Google best Photo spots for family photos near me, for example, and there would be maybe some links to some blogs where I can research maybe some Yelp articles or pages or a red at forum that shares some, and I'd have to dig through those to find the spot that I want. Here on Yelp, you see some parks pop up when you search for places to take pictures. Okay, a decent starting point. Maybe. Honestly, actually, some of these would be terrible for family photos. So now with the power of AI, we can do a much better deep dive. Now, the point of this demo is not to give you exactly what the prompt is that's going to work every time for you. It's to give you ideas of how you interact with these tools and how you can start to dive deeper so that you can get the results you're looking for. First question I had was, what are the best photo spots for family photos near me in Claremont, California? And it gave me a list of pretty good ones already better than what popped up on Yelp, for example. And I already know this, and I wanted to use Claremont as an example, because I wanted to see how good of a job does ChatGPT do. What's cool is it automatically gave me a couple categories like outdoor and nature backdrops versus architectural and urban spots, and that's something you could then prompt or use in an initial question or prompt, say, I want an urban architectural spot for family photos or for engagement photos or any specific type of photography, and it will provide that for you. This is great, but I want to push it a little bit further. So I asked exactly where the Claremont Wilderness Park would be good. And it gave me specific GPS coordinates for where to start and where to go. For example, the benches at the Panorama Vista Loop, that sounds like an amazing spot. I know this is like a two mile hike up the trail. So that's actually not a great spot for family photos, but it sure would be pretty. And so I kind of pushed back a little bit because I know that's not really practical for family photos. So I said, What other nearby areas have a similar vibe, but easier to park and get to for a larger family. And it gave a few great park options. It's giving some tips as well, and it even populated with a map with these locations. It was a little bit focused on the Claremont area, so I wanted to expand it. So I asked about some other cities in the local area, and it gave some other good options. I know Walnut Creek Park, for example, great place for family photos. And again, it populated a map. Now the other cool thing is that I asked for examples from these locations so I can get a vibe for the type of family photos. And so it popped up some of these examples, and it says where they're from, which is really cool because now I can kind of get a sense for what the photos might look like, what the setting is. Then asked specifically for one location and four photos at the California Botanic Garden, and it provided a couple of examples, again, of the sort of style and vibe background options, as well as a couple examples of photos with people in it. Now, it's not perfect. I kind of want more examples with people in it, but it definitely gives some great sort of vibe options of what it looks like there. Then asked for examples of photos more from downtown Claremont, for that more urban environment, just to again get sort of an example of what those types of photos might be. And this is something that maybe you find through a Google search, a photographer who takes photos at all these areas, and it maybe pins those points where those photos are from. But a lot of photographers don't they kind of like to keep their locations a little secret, so they might not have those locations on there. But because ChatGPT and these AI tools aggregate all this information from all over the Internet, it kind of pulls photo examples from all of these different locations, and you can get examples from different photographers as well. That's a quick demo of the types of things you can prompt to find locations for a photo shoot. I'm going to do another demo on just getting general inspiration for your own photography, not necessarily a spot for something like family photos coming up next. If you're like me, sometimes it's tough to find inspiration to go out and take photos of. And so AI is a great tool to get that inspiration, just to find specific spots that might be intriguing to you. So again, this demo is just to give you ideas of how to prompt, how to dive in deeper to get the results that you need. So first, I prompted saying I need inspiration to take photos. What are the top five spots within 5 miles of my town? And it gave a few spots that I know are pretty cool, but I don't know. I'm not that interested in going to these spots. But the way that it populated the map and gave ideas is great. If you're traveling, this would be amazing to do this type of prompt wherever you're going to a city and just prompting photo spots. I went even deeper. Now give me ten ideas for places that I can get to via public transportation, leaving around 8:30 A.M. And returning by 2:30 P.M. Giving me at least 2 hours at that location. This is like a full photo shoot planning tool where it's going to look at schedules of public transportation maps, but also the main goal of finding interesting spots to go to. So it gave me a bunch of options like the downtown LA Arts District, Alva Street, and Union Station, a place I love to go and take photos, Little Tokyo in downtown, Chinatown. And for some of them, it pops up photos. It kind of stopped doing that after the top three. So if I wanted to, I could probably prompt it to give me photos from all ten examples. But it does a pretty good job. Now, I wanted to dive a little bit deeper and prompt it for specific spots for people and street photos. So this would be another prompt that you can follow up with or add in your original prompt. And it gave me some more specific spots like Grand Central Market, Santa Monica Pier and promenade. Again, it gave us Alva Street, Pasadena, Old Town, spots that might be more likely to have people. So this is a great way to, like, just get inspiration for photos. Say you're going to a new place on a trip. Check out this prompt. What are the best photo spots in Geneva, Switzerland for cool architectural photography? Give me five spots that I could do on a walking tour in one day with a map and a plan for the day. Add a spot for lunch. Is just the power of prompting AI with more naturalistic language and wanting more details. So it gives me the spots, the timing. It gives some information about each spot. It gives me a lunch stop for inspiration. It gives me a schedule. It gives me some tips. Let's map this out. The results for that was a more detailed sort of itinerary with the different spots, which is great. It's not what I meant, but I like having the photo examples, which is super cool. And so then I prompted and I asked for really what I was looking for, which was a visual map with the walking path and spots marked. Now, sometimes these tools don't do exactly what you want. And sometimes it really surprises you because check out what it created, which is this poster like thing with a couple options for this walking day tour. Now, is this perfectly accurate? I don't think so. And I would have to double check with Google Maps to see if this was accurate. However, for some sort of promotional sort of poster, it's a pretty good initial job. And again, this is something that as a photographer, if you're running these types of photo tours or something, you can use a tool like ChatGPT to develop things for, like, marketing. So I prompted it up again and said what I wanted was a simple Google Maps version. And it still didn't do exactly what I was doing. It was close, but the locations I could tell were not correct, again. So sometimes it hallucinates. So I went back and was more specific and said, actually just pin these locations on Google Maps and give me the link. It did that, but really what I wanted was one link with all of the marked out in walking order. And so, finally, it provided exactly what I was looking for. Now that I've done this, I know I prompt it better next time. And now that you've watched this video, you know that you can prompt it better so that you could get to this result a lot faster. But hopefully now you can kind of get a sense for the power of these tools and what kinds of things you can do with it. We're going to continue with some more ideas for using AI to plan your photo shoots in the next demo. See you there. 37. Planning a Photoshoot with ChatGPT: You're starting out in your photography journey, and someone asks you to do family photos, and you feel a little anxious because you've never done them before. Well, with the help of a tool like ChatGPT, Gemini, perplexity, Claude, any of them, you can get a little bit of assistance. So an example of this would be prompting to get advice or suggestions for the types of posing and groupings that you might want to get photos of. So that was the prompt that I gave it. And I gave details like how many people the ages, where we were going to go and what I was looking for. And so it gave a great sort of breakdown of the different types of photos that I might want to get. This is great. It's a lot of text. And so what I then prompted was actually to have it create digital flashcards that represent the poses so that I can reference them, as well as sometimes it's nice to be able to just quickly show the client example of what you're looking for. Now, these are just sketches, but you could prompt it and ask for photos or realistic photos of these moments. But this is pretty cool. Now you have these quick flashcards that you can put on your phone quickly just look at and make sure that you're getting all the different poses or groupings that you need and want. Then I ask for just super simple, easy to read checklist of all the photos so that I can have that handy. And this is something again, you can just copy and paste onto your phone, put in an email, print out however you like to do that. I also ask for real photo examples for these different poses just to get those visual inspiration visual inspiration that I know as a photographer myself, like to have. It only gave me the one group family photo inspiration. So sometimes you have to re prompt, and I did. I asked for each setup in the checklist. So it has several options for, like, walking towards the camera, some candid examples, just grandparents. Now, some of these photos might not work well exactly for what you're looking for, but it gives you a little bit of inspiration for what you might want to do. And you can, of course, click on them and see them full screen to get better examples and what this might look like. So this is great for getting sort of inspiration for planning a photoshoot. Now, another question you might have is when should you do this photo shoot? And so I asked that. I said, The family is available in April. What's the best time to have this photoshoot? And I know this as a photographer, but it gave me information based off of what the lighting is going to be like in that particular month and time of the year, based off of, you know, daylight savings time and things like that. It tells me when what times to avoid. All pretty basic stuff that a beginner photographer should already know, but it is helpful. I'm going to kind of jump into something that I'll cover more in the next section. But what you can do with all of this information is then take it the next step and actually utilize it for running your photography business. So you can have ChatGPT create and draft an email with this information for the client that you're working with. It gives you your subject. It gives you an outline or a draft of what this email can be like. And so it has, like, the time, what will photograph, what to wear, what to bring, helpful tips for the kids, arrival information all drafted for you. Now, I think that this was a little bit too much information, so I asked it to kind of change a couple of things. We don't have to mention all the groupings, et cetera. Also cut down the time, knowing that 90 minutes is a bit too long for a bunch of kids to be taking photos. And so it redrafted and sort of simplified this email for us. All done with the power of AI. So hopefully, this is just getting the wheels spinning in your mind for all the things you can do to help you with your photography and your photography shoots, getting ideas, all of that, using ChatGPT or your AI tool of choice. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you in another demo. 38. Getting Photo Inspiration with ChatGPT: If you're a part of our photography and friends community or you've followed our courses, you know that I love photo challenges. We do weekly challenges in the community. I started the Photo Dash card challenge game and video series, and part of that was done with the help of AI. And that's this reverse-prompting. Making tool, your AI tool of choice prompt you with ideas for going out and taking photos. So a simple idea is to ask for a list of challenges that you can do in XYZ location. Inspire you to get out there and practice your photography. So here, it gave me ten fun photo challenge ideas. Really awesome. You could tailor this if you're working on street photography, architectural photography, working on your composition. If you're working on edits, you can tailor it to what you want to work on. And it's just a great way to get ideas for taking photos if it's hard for you to come up with them on your own. So use these tools as a reverse-prompting inspirational tool to get out there and take photos. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you in another demo. 39. Reverse-Prompting to get Inspired to Photograph with ChatGPT: Beyond just getting inspiration for going out on photo adventures, knowing where to photograph, what to photograph, which you can see here when I prompted for a theoretical dream upcoming trip to go back to Osaka Japan, finding ten locations that I should go to. Beyond just getting that sort of inspiration, you can ask for specific photographers to follow that might inspire you. So it gave me a couple. Again, I had to re prompt it asking for images from these photographers and these locations so that I can kind of get a sense for where are these locations. And then for those specific photographers, it shared with me, I wanted visuals without even having to go to another website, so it pulled in some images from those photographers, which look cool, very awesome, historical photographers. Although I did want some more modern and contemporary photographers that I might want to follow. And it had actually asked me that in an earlier result if it would like me to have it pull specific Instagram profiles of more contemporary Osaka street photographers who focus on people. And so now I have these links to different photographers who photograph in Japan, lots specifically in Osaka, but some others. And what's cool is that it actually brings up some photographers and examples of people who are bigger, smaller. It's nice to see smaller photographers like this one right here, only 538 followers, but taking some pretty cool images here in Osaka. And so you don't get that necessarily just that one top Osaka street photographer, top five that you would constantly see if you were just searching on Google or any other search engine, which is how those results used to appear when you searched for something like street photographer from Osaka. So, that's something I really like about the results that I've been seeing with giving prompts like this to ChatGPT. Like, super cool stuff. That's very inspiring. And that was because I prompted it for photographers who did more street photography, focusing on people with black and white photography. Again, the point is not to give a specific prompt to you that you can just copy and paste, but to just help you start to think of the different ways that you can prompt these tools to get better and better results. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you in another lesson. 40. How to Use AI for Starting & Running a Photography Business: Welcome to this new section on how AI can help run your photography business. Sounds great, right? Well, of course, AI is not going to be able to start, run or grow your own photography business successfully on its own. But it can do a lot of the busy work that allows you to spend your time doing the things that most grow a business, getting out there taking photos, getting out there meeting people, collaborating, editing photos, coming up with projects. That's what's going to help you grow your photography business, not things like sitting there for minutes trying to figure out what hash tag to use on your social media posts. So some of the things we're going to be covering in this section include market research. As a starter photographer, if you're out there trying to figure out, how much should I charge for my photography? This is probably one of the if not most asked questions in our courses, definitely the one that's most asked in our photography business course. Top question is, of course, what camera should I buy. But for those of you starting a business, how much should I charge? That's a very common question. And our previous advice would always be, well, you should do some research and find out in your local area what it what are the going rates? What are the going rates for a couples or family photo session for a wedding photographer? And you'd have to go on platforms like Yelp or Google and find other wedding photographers in your area, go to their website, search through their sales pages and find out what are they charging for? Now you can do that all with any sort of AI tool like a ChatGPT, and it will do that for you. It will surface it. You can prompt it to find the top five photographers in your area. Or if you don't want the top five, meaning, the highest rated, but maybe like an average photographer, you can prompt that and will give you a more realistic. You could even prompt it asking things like photography businesses that started in the past few years. You can do all of that stuff to get even more detailed market research, which is super helpful when starting a business. Drafting website copy, drafting photo captions, drafting client emails, drafting contracts. These all kind of go on the same bucket of time that you would have spent doing yourself, writing it yourself, which has a lot of art to it in some senses, and some people really enjoy that. But for those of you who don't enjoy the writing aspect of all of this, you can have these tools do it for you. So you can get back to what you love most, which is taking photos. So we're going to be diving into these in the next demos, but again, same tools as last section. We've got ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and who knows what's going to be out in the future. These tools are going to get more and more powerful and the interface changes. So again, in the demos, things might look a little bit different for you depending on where you're watching the course. But anyways, let's dive into the demos. 41. Do Market Research with ChatGPT: To this demo in the section on using AI to help you with your business. So in this lesson and the following ones, I'm going to give you some examples of what I would suggest doing if you were starting a photo business. And it's not necessarily to give you exact prompts for, like, copying and pasting and just doing it wherever you are, but just to really inspire you and get your brain working in how you can prompt and dive deeper with repmpts into your tool. I'm using ChatGPT, but you can use any tool that you want. So the example that I'm giving you first is to do market research. I'm pretending that I'm going to be a photographer in Sedona, Arizona, that I typically do family and couple photography, and that I want to know how much people charge, what gaps there are in the market as a new photographer in this area. And it does a great job at giving me pricing information based off of the entry level, mid range or high end type of photography, even with the type of package information that I might want to offer. I can ask for sources on this if I wanted to dive in and double check. Where are you getting this information from? It even gave me examples of where people might want to take photos. So this is great if I'm completely brand new to the area. Likely you maybe live there and you already know, but this is great just to have that information. It gives me ideas for what the market is like, what gaps I could fill. And this really gave me an idea for what I might want to do. Midwek mini sessions for tourists. This sparked the idea of Hey, this is actually a pretty cool market to target the traveler, the person who's coming that likes to have super nice family photos, whether it's for a more formal setting of, like, that annual family photo for the holiday card, or if it's just wanting to have a photographer take some nice photos of them on their vacation. That's a really cool idea that I'm seeing more and more of. It continued with some ideas for types of photography that Dona doesn't necessarily have, but might work well for you. And then it kind of finalizes with a basic pitch for what it would suggest starting off with as an offer. I followed up to prompt it for a more finesse breakdown of the packages and pricing that I can offer, and it went ahead and did that. Now, I'm just taking all of this information. But if I were you, I would probably take this information, look at it, make the edits that I'd like to edit, and then paste it back into your tool and say, these are the edits that I've made. And then from there, you can prompt it with what is next. And for me, I wanted to get some landing page information, a draft for my website. So that's what I prompted next, and that's exactly what it did. Keyword friendly text for my website. Different sections that I might want to include, break down the types of packages and pricing. And of course, all this might not go on one page. Maybe you break it down into different pages on a website, but this is nice to have all in one great landing page that potential clients can come find and see. It's even got frequently asked questions, calls to actions, all the stuff that you would need for a landing page. And of course, you can then prompt it to adjust, move things around, take bits and parts what you like, what you don't like. The power of these tools is that then you can ask it to change the tone, change who you're marketing to, change how you're doing it. And so I did that by saying, make it more geared towards families to capture that market. And so it really, really went in and it changed the text to make it pitched more for families rather than general people coming to Sedona for photography. So it gave me all of this information that I could then use for my website. So I'm going to pause there. I've got more coming that continues this workflow. But for now, you have some basic inspiration for what you can do with a tool to do market research and even all the way up to drafting content for your website using ChatGPT. See you in the next demo. 42. Draft and Respond to Client Emails with ChatGPT: Continuing on from the previous demo, the next thing I did in this same thread was to draft an email intro for someone inquiring about my photography. I asked it to include information about location ideas, types of photography costs, the process, all of that basic information, but I also asked it to be short and sweet so that it's not too long. Drafted this email, super simple, take it, edit it, make it your own. But took about 10 seconds to do this rather than writing it out myself. Something that I could save as a draft in my email tool, save as a template, and just use over and over. Something you can also do with emails is you can actually just copy and paste the email from whatever email tool you use right into ChatGPT and ask to respond to this. And if you tell ChatGPT in this thread or in another thread, who you are, say, I'm the SetonaFamily photographer, respond from me as that business, it will tailor the message with that information in mind. So that's something that you can do just to speed up your workflow, whether it's drafting new emails or even responding to existing emails that you have. All right, I'm going to continue with some more demos regarding this process coming up next. 43. Draft Photography. Contracts with ChatGPT: One thing you can do with AI is quickly draft contracts. Now, contracts big scary word. And of course, I'm going to have to say that with any contract or anything dealing with legal stuff, you got to have a lawyer go through it. Now, if you're going to do that or not, it's up to you. But at the very least, you can have your tool of choice draft some sort of contract for you. So I had JTGPT in the same thread with the Sedona Family Mini Session project, draft a contract for the 30 minute mini sessions that we do. And so it has all the basic information that you would expect to see in a contract. It's got the details, the payment info, the cancellation process, and it came up with all of this information on its own. You could either go in and edit it yourself. You could repmpt it if you need to make any changes, or if you have that information up front, you wouldn't want to include it to say things like, for payment, I require a $100 booking deposit, and it would include that instead of just making up something here. But it has all of this information that would typically come from a photo contract. And it's, again, something that was drafted in 30 seconds, and you can take it and go ahead and edit it, use it, show it to a lawyer, make sure it's exactly what you want and need. But, man, the power of these tools is just, so impressive. 44. Quickly Draft Photo Captions for Social Media with ChatGPT: Need help with your social media. Well, of course, these tools can help with that, too. So one idea is to create a draft of a text template that you can use for your photos. Sticking with the Sedona photographer theme, I asked for a social media text template that I could use. It gives a few different options based off of the different purposes for the posts. For example, a vacation hook versus an emotional angle versus something short and punchy, great for reels, carousel posts, Airbnb is targeting. So it's targeting different types of potential clients. And, of course, it's just coming up with this information by itself, but you could give it this idea. Say, I'm targeting families who are visiting XYZ specific spot. Create a template for that. And so now, hopefully, if someone is doing their travel research and they are searching for family photography in a specific spot or just photography or just searching for inspiration for their travels, your post might show up. Now, it gave me some optional hash tags. The cool thing about Cha chi PT and all these tools is a knowledge base that's constantly being updated with what is the latest information. So I asked it for more hashtags that could be used, and I asked in general, if I should be using hashtags. Now, personally, I know this information already. However, if you're new to social media, you might not be aware that hash tags it's not the best way to get the information in front of people like it was eight, ten years ago. You can still use hashtags, but you don't want to just blast a block of 30 hashtags on every post. So you might want to pick the most relevant ones. You want to pick the ones that are more long tail ones, not just generic ones like hashtag photography, for example, and it gives a lot of these that would be pretty specific in helping to showcase your content. It also gives some ideas, which I would probably prompt further for more ideas on how to get my posts in front of potential clients, such as tagging specific accounts like the Visit Sedona account, the specific trail, local Airbnb accounts, resorts, et cetera. And then it follows up and asks you what you want it to do next, build a 30 day Sedona. Instagram content plan, write SEO optimized caption templates, or help you rank for SidonaFamily photographer on Google. That sounds amazing to me, so let's do that. And then it gives you all of the information you need to help with that. Of course, is it going to work like magic? Probably not. But ranking website, starting a business, none of this stuff is easy and overnight, so I wouldn't go into this thinking, I I do all these steps, I'm automatically going to be successful. However, this is all very good information that you need to do, such as starting your Google Business profile, advanced tips, making sure the SEO in the file name of your post actually includes the important search engine keywords that would surface it when people are searching for these words, including alternative texts, all this stuff that most people skip. So use your tools to support you in your photography business. There are so many additional ways that you can use these tools. I'm hoping that this section just gave you inspiration in some ideas for getting started. If you have any magical ways that you use these tools to help with your business, please let me know. I would love to include them here for the other students. Well, until next time, have a great day, and I'll see you in another lesson soon. 45. How to Use AI as Your Photography Guide: Wouldn't it be great to have a photo mentor available to you whenever you want 247? Well, that's what this section is all about. How can AI answer questions and give you feedback on your photography? It would be amazing if I could be there for you all the time. I love being a photo mentor to people, both in the courses as well as in our photography and friends community. And I don't think there's a true replacement for that unique perspective of another photographer, another human. However, there are a lot of questions and things that can be asked and you can get a response in seconds from your choice of AI tool. That again, allows not only you to get back to taking photos and doing what you love best, but also allows me as someone on the other side of this where students, it's just inevitable that a lot of the Q&A and those kinds of things have been replaced by AI Tool. That has allowed me to spend less time answering those questions over and over and over and more time coming up with fun, creative ways to serve you as a photography mentor through things like our frame by frame live weekly show where I go over the submissions to our weekly photo challenges, doing our Photo show, and just working on my own photography myself. So some examples of what you might want to do using a tool of your choice, like Chachi PT is to ask just questions for quick replies. I'm talking about all of those questions that you have in your head, like, whether you know what lens should I get? What's the best camera for my budget. But also ones like what does exposure compensation mean? What is an F stop? Those basic ones, two more advanced ones. These tools can answer those questions for you. But you can also use them in a little bit more of an advanced way by actually submitting your photos, and it can give you some critique. So you can actually upload a photo and ask for critique or some sort of specific feedback. You can ask for things like editing suggestions. You can ask for it to identify strengths and weaknesses. Now, all of this you have to take with a grain of salt. The AI tool and their AI generated responses are going to be based on all of the information that these tools have consumed, meaning basically all of the information on the Internet of what makes a good photo, what makes a bad photo. What are things that people should look for to improve composition, to improve editing. And then it's going to analyze your photo and then base its response from its experiences. Now, that can be very powerful. I mean, more powerful than the information that I have in my brain when I'm giving feedback on a photo. However, it's not a very artistic way of providing feedback. So it's fun to play around with, and I encourage you to do so because maybe it is a way for you to get unstuck, to get inspiration for your own photography. But I hope and I know that it's not going to be a perfect replacement for a real human giving you their own personal feedback. But like I always say, photography is very personal. Whenever I provide feedback, I always tell people that this is just my opinion. And so it's very similar with these AI tools, which, again, we're going to be using these same ones ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, Claude to do some of this stuff. And again, I'll be using mostly HGBT, maybe Google Gemini just to test it out, but feel free to use the same prompts and ideas with your tool of choice. With that, let's get in to the demos. 46. Asking ChatGPT Unique & Difficult Photography Questions: While I'd love to be there to answer any question you have about photography, it's just not possible. And now, with these AI tools, they can be your photographer mentor 247. You can ask general questions, specific questions pertaining to your specific situation. Here's a little bit of inspiration on how to do that, just a quick demo. Again, this can be done with any AI tool. I'm in ChatGPT using the plus version. However, the free version will give you great results and other tools like Gemini, perplexity, AI, Claude, all of them do a great job. And ask basic questions like, what's the best street photography lens for my Fuji film XT four? Gives you a lot of options. But this is similar to what you might find in a blog article 0R popping up on Google, and it has a bunch of lenses that have different price ranges, but maybe you have a very specific price range. And so you can ask that which lens is under $500? And it gives you now a list of just the ones that are under $500. That one's not under $500. Bad on you ChatGPT, but most of them were well within that budget. Now, that's great, but I want to see examples and I don't want to have to do the effort of going to another website to look for examples. I want ChatGPT to bring them to me. So I asked, Any YouTube tutorials, Photo walks that use this lens? Well, I didn't specify which lens I probably should have, but it did bring back some great tutorials, street photo walks and things like that using these different types of lenses, testing them out, which is just amazing. And I could watch it right here in ChatGPT. So the simple asking a question, getting answers and getting feedback and advice for your situation, that is probably the first way that I would use ChatGPT as a mentor. Coming up in the next demo, I'm going to dive into how you can actually use it to critique your own photography, give you advice, even going so far as specific editing advice, and you'll see all of that coming up in that next demo. I'll see you over there. 47. Asking ChatGPT to Give Feedback on Your Photography: In this lesson, I'm using ChatGPT as my photo mentor. I'm getting advice on my specific photography, and this is going to blow your mind. Whenever you're starting a new chat, it can be a good idea to just start out by stating who you want the tool to be. So what I did was I specifically said, You are my photography mentor. I'm going to give you some photos, and I want you to tell me what I can do to specifically improve the composition to make these photos better. It said, Yeah, sure, sure, sure. And then I uploaded an actual photo of mine to see what the results. Actually uploaded three of them. And so it went through each photo one at a time, and it gave a list of what's working, what's weak, how I can improve it. Amazing. This is what I do with my photography students, and it's kind of sad to see because this is super powerful. And it's not something that I want to replace myself with. And I don't think that having that human reaction to a photo, that impression, that critique, that feedback is going to be replaced 100% however, the fact that you can do this from your computer at any time and get a response as detailed as this is pretty amazing. Now, like everything, you got to take what they say, what they what ChatBD says with a grain of salt. Some of it is not completely accurate. Sometimes it's just basing off its response on what the general consensus of the Internet says about what good photos look like. And since photography is such a personal art, who knows? It might not be true. However, the details that it goes into is incredible. So specifically, let me show you this photo. This was taken at a giant temple in Nara in Japan. Just notice some of the things that I actually already edited this photo, but notice some of the things. There's people down below, and I like the people because it gives a sense of how massive the scale of this building is. It's just incredible made out of wood. But some of the feedback is just, like, spot on, pretty good. The weakness is the bottom of the frame is messy and cut awkwardly. The crowd is dense but not organized visually. And that is true. Could I really do much about it? I'm not sure. But the advice to go lower, to get lower to the ground, I think, is good to clean up the bottom edge, specifically saying heads are being chopped randomly 100%. Of course, if I could take this photo exactly how I would want, I would want to have it cropped with full bodies, not cutting anyone's bodies off, especially not in the middle of people's faces. So the detail that it kind of goes into is kind of uncanny. But really cool. This is your personal photography mentor that's going to help you out. Other thing you can do is upload a photo, whether it's edited already or not and ask for editing advice. I've already edited this photo, but I wanted to see, is there something that I could do to make it better. So I asked, What specific editing advice do you have for this photo? It says it's strong, which is great. Of course, these tools are going to try to make you happy and make you feel good. But it gives me some ideas, like cropping a little bit tighter on the right, saying that it's got a little bit much of dark negative space. Maybe trying a different vertical crop might be interesting, reducing the brightest lantern highlights slightly. Like, that's true. Like, this lantern right here and this one are a little bright, and I didn't think about that when I was editing this photo, but probably bringing that down would make them a little bit red or match the red of the lanterns on top of the window and look pretty darn cool. I understand the initial reaction to wanting to crop out some of this side. I like it. I like the balance between this. So, of course, I'm not going to follow everything that it says, But dang, pretty cool stuff that you're getting there. Now, I wanted to take it a step further. Well, first, I actually just asked it to make a simplified checklist for this because it gave me all this text, little too. I'm not going to show you all of it because it's too much, but it was a lot, and it was hard to follow. So I said, Make a checklist version of this, and it did that for me. I even went further. I asked, Can you create a Lightroom preset for this? Now, it can't just create the exact preset file for you, but it can give you all the information that you would need to create a preset, so it has the specific ratings for all of the different settings that you could play around with so much cool stuff. And this actually works pretty well for plugging into Lightroom and editing the photo. So making a computer do it, but pretty good. Now I wanted to just do another photo just to see what it says. This is an unedited photo, and what it says is pretty much exactly what I would do. Exposure, raise just a little bit, increase contrast, lower highlights, lift shadows, texture and clarity for sure, pop that sharpness. Yep. Talks about the eye enhancement, for sure, which is something I would want to do with this photo. You want to make sure the eyes are sharp and tight and just sparkle. So lots of good specific examples. Dropping the clarity and the dehaze and saturation for the background is actually pretty cool idea. Just a nice little checklist of all the things that you might want to consider doing. So using these tools as your own photography mentor is super sweet. Whether you're asking simple or complicated questions or submitting photos for feedback, it's very powerful. I hope I've inspired you to get out there and try out these tools to help you as a photographer. And if you have any ideas or things that you use these tools for that you think that other students should know, I know I haven't covered everything here in this class, but I wanted to just give you some ideas. And if there's anything that you think that I didn't cover, but others should know, let me know, and I'll make sure I add it to the class. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you in another lesson. 48. Thank You & What's Next?: Thank you so much for being here and taking this course. I hope that you've come away with a lot of ideas for how to use AI as a photographer in all aspects of your journey and your job or your hobby as a photographer. That was my goal with this class. So, if you've come away with a few things that inspired you, that you're like, Hey, I didn't know that I could do that. Then I feel like my job is done, and I'm so happy for you. If you haven't taken a moment to leave a rating, a review for this class, I would really appreciate if you do that. Now, your reviews help me know what you like best about the course, as well as helping other students know if this is the right course for them or not. If you are interested in other types of photography, specific areas, whether it's portrait photography, street photography or diving deeper into editing apps like Lightroom, I've got courses on all kinds of things related to photography, and you could find those on my profile or on my website, videoschool.com. It's got links to all of our courses there. In between taking a course, I hope you join us over at the photography and friends community. That's our free community for photography students and photographers. We do things like weekly challenges. I often do photo reviews through our frame by frame series. We got lots of fun stuff going on over there, so check that out over at photography and friends.com. I would love to see you in another class or in the community, and until then have a beautiful day and good luck with your photography journey. Bye.