Posted by Team Aftershoot Making Life Easy With Aftershoot, a Photo Culling Software
There's nothing quite like the feeling of photographing a huge event like a wedding. If you're like many photographers, the actual shooting part is the most fun part of the entire job! You're in your element, doing what you love.
And then comes the culling of the photos. Don't you wish you could find a photo culling software that would do this boring task for you?
It's so time-consuming choosing photos that many photographers confess photo culling is the thing they like least about their job. That’s exactly why we created Aftershoot, an AI culling software that speeds up your selection process 10x, if not more!
You just got home from shooting a wedding, now what?
First things first, you need to take care of yourself! Grab yourself something hydrating and something nourishing to feed your body. Photographing a wedding is exhilarating and exhausting, and when you get home, you might find yourself dropping with fatigue as the adrenaline of the day wears off.
The next thing to do should be non-negotiable: Back up the wedding photos.
Some photographers will keep backing up their photos throughout the day if they have an assistant, but if you don't, backing them up as soon as you arrive home is recommended.
How you decide to back up isn't as important as doing it the same way every time. Some photographers save to hard drives, some save to a cloud-based system, and some to RAID systems. However you do it, do it, in the same manner, every single time.
Make sure your naming protocol is the same for each wedding because it will make your life so much easier if you are trying to locate files.
A popular file format for naming is year_monthday_clientname_clientname
So if Joe Smith and Karen Anderson got married on October 7, 2022, the file naming format would be: 2022_1007_Smith_Anderson
This helps keep the number sequential and makes the backup easy to find.
Let Aftershoot help you cull quicker!
Next up is photo culling, which excludes all the duplicates, bad exposures, blinks, or other photos that don't live up to your standards.
This part of the job is what most wedding photographers agree is the most tedious part of the process. Going through all the images manually, photo culling can take hours of work, and it's not particularly creative work. Which is why professional photographers tend to procrastinate on photo culling.
Aftershoot's AI-Assisted Culling or Automated AI Culling will help you get rid of undesired photos quickly and get you into the final stages of photo editing faster.
Through the power of AI, Aftershoot goes through your entire gallery of photos, sorts, groups, and can remove (not delete, don't worry) the photos that you wouldn't deliver to your clients.
Because Aftershoot has been trained to recognize closed eyes, missed focus, blurry photos, and similar images or duplicates, it chooses the best images that would meet your photographic standards for your studio.
Aftershoot makes culling images a breeze with its advanced AI tech
Culling and editing photos are tedious, but it can be quicker with the right photo-culling software to do the heavy lifting for you.
By looking at so many pictures in rapid succession, your mind starts to break down as you try different tactics for cutting back on this time-consuming task; frustration begins building slowly. Aftershoot saves you from this, helping you by choosing for you and keeping you from getting overwhelmed, exhausted, and analysis paralysis.
Being a photographer takes artistic and technical skills. Sitting at a computer clicking Yes, No, Yes, No, Yes, Yes…on thousands of images during the culling process is not an artistic endeavor!
While other software such as Lightroom or Photo Mechanic helps you speed up the process of culling, Aftershoot goes the distance and does the heavy lifting for you so you can edit faster down to the final images. This frees you up your time for more creative pursuits or even to just take time away from your business to rest and rejuvenate with family and friends.
After all, the photos have been ingested, and the photo cull has run. You can go through the galleries to make sure the photos that were chosen look good and meet your brand standards. You can even glance through the photos that Aftershoot has moved out of the cull.
If Aftershoot has moved a photo out of the gallery that you would have kept in, then you can simply move it to the final gallery, and when you do that, Aftershoot "learns" your preferences. The more you use Aftershoot, the smarter it gets (we like to call these your magical unicorns that do the photo selections or rejections for you!)
When you wake up, you'll have a culled gallery ready for your review!
One of the features that photographers like the most is that Aftershoot can identify photos that you can use to give your clients a sneak peek of their images while you continue to work on editing their gallery.
The images are chosen based on what photos are popular and trending on social media and the information Aftershoot learns about your style of shooting.
This makes it super easy to find and fully edit those photos that you know your clients are going to love and that potential clients will love, too.
Voila, you have more time for what matters!
Aftershoot gives you time back for your business and your life. Imagine that you spend 3 hours culling photos for a wedding of 2,000 images, and on average, you shoot 20 weddings per year.
That's a conservative estimate; most photographers report that the whole process takes them much longer than 3 hours because of analysis paralysis and because they tend to get distracted from the job as it's tedious and monotonous.
But, for the sake of averages, let's say it takes you 3 hours to cull the images and pick the best photos from your raw files. 3 hours, with no break, looking at photos and making decisions. That's about 5 seconds to decide yes or no on an image.
3 hours x 20 weddings = 60 hours. More than one full week of work is spent on culling photos of what Aftershoot can do for you in minutes. What could you do with 60 hours of your time in your business?
How about personally? Wouldn't you love to spend that 60 hours you save and spend more time with your family, maybe going on vacation or making memories with friends?
Aftershoot even provides photographers a free trial that will grant you access to its powerful culling features for 30 days.
Aftershoot is proud that it saves professional photographers hours in their business and gives them more creative freedom and the opportunity for personal enrichment.
What's next?
As of 2023, Aftershoot has lots more than just AI culling to offer. Aftershoot also helps you edit your photos faster than ever before. How fast? 1,000 images edited in less than a minute!
You can find more info about editing with Aftershoot here: Introducing Aftershoot EDITS – AI Automated Editing