How the master photographer finally found a robot that could edit just like her—Imagen AI—and it has become the biggest time saver of her career.

“I really wish I could spend more time in front of the computer!” said no photographer ever. But putting in hours of work to process raw files is exactly what most pros do. Now, with AI-powered editing, that’s changing fast. How fast? “Crazy fast,” says Brooklyn-based photographer Susan Stripling. 

Stripling has been using the industry-leading Imagen AI editing solution for her post-wedding work, and it has revolutionized her workflow. “After I’ve culled down the images to my keepers,” she explains, “I put all of the raw files in Lightroom and then send my Lightroom catalog up to Imagen AI.” Then, she says, “I go take a shower, I come back, and all of the images are ready for download.” Job done.

Imagen can edit 1,500 photos in under 10 minutes. “It is hands down the biggest time saver of my career,” says Stripling. “I’m not being dramatic. It really is that remarkable.” With an AI photo culling feature currently in beta, Imagen promises to cut postproduction time even more.

But what about quality? Photographers who have been less than thrilled with results from other automatic editing tools have good reason to be skeptics. With over 20 years as an image maker under her belt, Stripling was one of them. “For the longest time,” she says, “I was like, ‘How can a robot edit better than I can?’” Then she gave the robot a spin and realized: “Of course it can.”

“No matter how good you are as a human being,” Stripling says, “there’s user error when you’re editing your own images. If I just show Imagen what I want to do, there’s no human error.” All it takes to train the AI is uploading an existing Lightroom catalog to Imagen. “It needs to have the raw files with your edits on top of them,” Stripling explains. Imagen uses them to create a unique Personal AI Profile that it will apply to edit your images just the way you would.

And the AI keeps learning. “Every time I get a wedding back from Imagen, if I make any tweaks whatsoever, I send all of the edits back up again so that my profile can learn me even better,” says Stripling. “The fact that you can keep teaching it means that you can evolve your style over the years, and your profile will evolve with it.” Imagen’s new Profile Adjustment feature will soon make fine tuning profiles even easier, and its recently added Subject Mask feature automates local adjustments.

Photographers can create multiple Personal AI Profiles for all the different genres they work in and share profiles with other photographers. You can even use profiles created by Stripling and other master photographers by applying one of Imagen’s built-in Talent AI profiles. If you’re headed to WPPI, you can get all the details from Susan Stripling herself in her workflow class, Editing with AI – The New Workflow. “It’s going to take people all the way from the very first inquiry to the last delivery of images to clients,” she says. “But a big chunk of it is talking about how working with AI has changed the entire trajectory of my wedding workflow.”