Using AI can help you streamline your photography in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago.
From the autofocus systems to the final retouching, you can find AI solutions that will change your photography forever.
Whether you’re a professional or a photography enthusiast, you’ll love these five smart ways to use AI in your photography.
5 Smart Ways to Use AI in Your Photography Right Now
Artificial intelligence entered the realm of digital photography as a transformative tool. Here are five innovative ways to use it to your advantage in your photographic practice.
1. Generate Digital Background
Generative AI is one of the most revolutionary applications of AI technologies in photography. Specialized websites and software can translate your text prompts into images.
The results can be very realistic, generating visuals that look like photographs. This technology extends backgrounds, adds or removes objects in photos, etc.
(Check out this guide to writing AI text prompts to learn how to get realistic results.)
One of the most common uses of generative AI is to create digital backgrounds. This is an efficient and budget-friendly way to produce a variety of sceneries for images.
For photographers, this technology has opened up a world of possibilities that would otherwise be impossible due to the limitations imposed by the need to build and store backgrounds and props.
Photoshop now includes AI Generative Fill and AI Generative Expand, which you can use during editing to change or extend backgrounds. However, Adobe Firefly is more popular for blending AI-generated images with photos.
Another two of the most common programs used to generate digital backgrounds are DALL-E 3 and Midjourney.
2. Enhance Your Images
You can also use AI to analyze your images and automatically enhance them. Most photo editing apps and software have AI-powered tools that do this type of work, saving you a great deal of time and effort.
Enhancing a photo means adjusting color, contrast, sharpness, and other aspects to improve its overall quality.
Some programs, such as Luminar Neo, have chosen these tools as their strong point. You can use any of its specifically designed features, such as Water AI or Twilight AI. You can also use the Enhance AI tool for overall results.
Other editing programs also include AI-enhancement tools in their array of features. A great example is Brillance AI from ON1 Photo Raw.
It’s important to acknowledge that enhancement tools are just a starting point, and photographers still fine-tune their images to achieve their creative vision.
This is why choosing editing programs with AI enhancement tools that allow for further customization is essential.
3. Fast Complex Retouching
AI has revolutionized photo editing and retouching. Thanks to AI, complex techniques that used to require great skills and many hours of work can now be automated.
Don’t get me wrong – you still need skills to make realistic, quality work. But AI gives photographers and creators a helping hand.
Some of the most popular retouching processes that AI has tackled are sky replacement and background removal. The competition to see which software develops the best technology is on.
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Photoshop, Luminar Neo, ON1 Photo Raw, and others have fantastic sky replacement tools. You can even find free online resources that do a great job regarding background removal.
AI masking is another amazing tool for making local adjustments, clipping paths, and photo compositing. Most photo editors have incorporated this technology, but some offer better results than others.
Some lesser-known but still popular AI retouching tools are skin retouching, shadow generation, and the ghost mannequin effect.
4. Upscale Pictures
If you’ve ever tried to increase a photo’s resolution before AI, you probably know how frustrating it can be. You couldn’t exceed a specific limit before you started to noticeably lose quality.
Nowadays, AI upscaling uses deep learning models that predict and add details and textures to pictures so they can get better quality results and achieve much bigger resolutions.
AI upscaling has also become much faster and is now available in most photo editors. It’s also possible to do this online – often for free. In many cases, it’s possible to customize the tools to find the best balance between speed and quality.
Some AI upscale software can even handle batch processing, allowing you to enhance the resolution of multiple pictures at once.
If you’re looking for photo editors that include AI upscaling, you can use the Adobe Creative Cloud apps, Luminar Neo, On1 Photo Raw, and Capture One.
You can also try dedicated programs such as Topaz Photo AI.
5. Photo Management
Culling, organizing, and keywording are some of the most tedious tasks for creative minds. However, these tasks are essential for any photographer – especially professionals who handle multiple clients and numerous files for each photo shoot.
AI has made these processes much faster and easier. AI photo managers can filter out images where subjects have their eyes closed or are not smiling.
It can also star the images it considers best based on deep learning. This may happen thanks to the program learning from huge public or proprietary databases, but you can also train your own.
Adding or suggesting keywords based on the content or characteristics of the photographs is also very helpful. Facial recognition can even help you identify and group your subjects.
AI can also detect duplicates and remove them, helping you save storage space. Smart search can also help you find photos using natural language, going beyond the keywords and metadata.
Some popular solutions include Excire Foto 2024, PhotoPrism, and Qumagie. However, other all-in-one programs, such as ON1 Photo Raw, also include these features.
