Imagen AI Review - Is It Worth It?

Editing photos is by far the most time-consuming part of being a wedding and portrait photographer. In fact, surveys have said that photographers report that over 50% of their working hours are spent on editing alone. What if I told you that this does not have to be the case? What if I told you that an entire wedding could be edited in the amount of time it takes you to drink a cup of coffee. Almost sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Well, you clicked on the right article.

What is Imagen AI?

Imagen AI is AI-based editing software. The software has the ability to white balance and color correct images, adjust exposures and tone sliders, crop, subject select, and cull images (though I still prefer to cull my own images). The AI can mimic any style and does so by looking at thousands of images that you have edited to create an AI editing profile. As you refine images that are edited by Imagen, it will continue to learn to perfectly adjust to your style, from editing to cropping.

How Imagen AI Works

When you first sign up for Imagen, you get a free trial (click here to get 1500 free trial edits!). Before the AI can begin, you must choose to either have it create a custom profile for you based off of past edits you have done yourself or by choosing a “talent AI profile” which is based on AI profiles that were created by other creators and photographers. I personally chose to create my own AI profile so that the AI could be best suited for my style but you can of course choose whatever works best for you!

After you either create your own profile by having the AI sample your work or you select a “talent profile” (profiles created by other photographers), you can create a new project and upload your images for the AI to edit. Imagen AI edits images at a record breaking pace of 0.33 seconds per image and so even a gallery of 1000 images will only take the AI five and a half minutes to edit (yes, you read that right).

Once the AI is done, you will be notified and then in seconds you can download the edits and begin to do a quality check of the images in Lightroom. Typically for me, a quality check and a little fine-tuning takes about 10-20 minutes to complete max. All in all, a wedding takes me 20-30 minutes from start to finish once the culling is done. Pretty mind blowing.

What is it good at?

As you can imagine, this software is pretty revolutionary. However, it is not a one-click fix. This AI is especially good at color correcting and color grading images, adjusting exposure and tones, and cropping to match your typical editing style. After using this AI on tens of thousands of images, I have found that nearly 80% of all the images it edits need no adjustment. Of the remaining 20%, most need some minor tweaking (a small re-crop or slight exposure bump), and only a handful may need a bit more TLC. I am constantly blown away that an AI is this good at editing to my standards.

What are its weaknesses?

Though this AI is pretty remarkable, it does have some shortcomings. In my use of the AI, I have found that it does tend to struggle at times when there are multiple light sources of varying color temperature on the subject of focus. My best guess is that it cannot quite figure out what temperature to adjust the image for. This phenomenon is quite rare though and is most common as you could imagine, indoors or late at night. It is also relatively easy to fix by just batch-adjusting the white balance yourself or tweaking the few images that are affected.

Lastly, this AI does not do any kind of local adjustments, masking, or healing. I personally do not find this to be a big deal at all because in the past when I hand edited all my images, 90% of my editing time consisted of items that Imagen now does for me. I would not be surprised if some day this AI does do these things but at this point it does not. No big deal. That being said, I do still hand-edit most of my images from the sunset session and couple’s portraits; the images that require the most attention and artistic editing.

My Impressions After a Full Wedding Season (40 weddings) of use

In the past, I used to outsource much of my work to an editing company called Photographer’s Edit. At the time, it was incredible. They took away nearly 50% of my time spent editing and (at the time) were worth every penny. They charged $0.25 per photo and so most of my weddings cost me $120 - $200 to have them edit. When I received the images back though, they were far from perfect and did take considerably more editing (2 - 4 hours) to finalize. The service did save me time, but nothing like what integrating AI into my workflow has done.

Fast forward to this last wedding season spent using Imagen and my life as a photographer, entrepreneur, father, and husband has been radically different. I have gotten hours of my life back every week, and what once used to be an all-consuming job during the summer has almost become what feels like a part-time job. So much so that I have even started to try and grow my business in other ways and expand my knowledge into other fields of work entirely. I have also had so much more time for my family and to find new hobbies. It has been refreshing and also a little bit interesting trying to fill my newly found free time with productive activities.

Pricing - Is Imagen AI worth it?

The best part about Imagen is its extremely affordable pricing. While outsourcing used to cost me $0.25 per photo, Imagen costs me just $0.0625 per image. This saves me thousands of dollars in editing costs per year when compared to the outsourcing I used to do.

Imagen’s pricing starts at $0.05 per photo. If you decide to have the AI crop, straighten, or select the subject for your images, an extra $0.01 per item per photo is charged. So if you want the AI to crop your images and straighten them, each image will cost $0.07 if you do not subscribe to one of their annual plans.

On that note, Imagen does have annual plans that come with discounted rates. Their annual plans are based on the total number of photos you plan to have edited. Any images that are edited past the included edits of a plan are charged at the same per-image rate for that plan. The plans include up to 18K, 36K, 72K images per year and offer 10%, 15%, 20% off per image respectively. However, these discounted rates do not apply to additions like cropping, straightening, and subject select which still incur a $0.01 charge per item per photo.

Imagen AI Review - Final Comments

Imagen AI is an amazing tool that I believe more photographers will be integrating into their editing workflow in the coming months and years. While AI still cannot flawlessly cull and edit a full wedding with no input or quality check, I do think that over time AI will begin to fully replace editing as photographers know it. It will be interesting to see what happens to the photography industry as AI starts to open up more time for photographers and allow them to take on more projects or enjoy a bit more free time if they prefer. I for one cannot complain and am both excited yet still slightly apprehensive to see what the future holds. If you would like to try out Imagen AI for yourself, click here to get 1500 free edits! If it works well, be sure to sign up for one of their plans for even more savings on editing! You wont regret it.