Megan Breukelman

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AI Culling for Wedding Photographers: Aftershoot Review

This article contains a referral link with 10% off your Aftershoot subscription.

Aftershoot is an AI culling tool for wedding photographers. It helps to speed up the culling process by automatically selecting the best photos from a shoot. Aftershoot is available as a desktop application and I’ve got to say: I’m in love.

I have been using Aftershoot for a few months now, and I am very impressed with it. I’ve seen it in action at several weddings and it never fails me. At the wedding day, I download all images onto an external hard drive. Once this daunting process is over, the fun really begins.

The next step is opening up Aftershoot where I add a new folder with the current wedding images. I’m prompted to choose my settings for how intensely I want the app to cull. I try to keep things on the mid-range settings to give some leeway for error. After all – AI is awesome but nothing is more perfect than a photographer’s eye.

When the new folder is added, Aftershoot begins to work. You can watch as it goes through each image and makes its decisions. It’s pretty amazing to see! Aftershoot uses AI technology to rank images by visual appeal so you can quickly pick out your favorites.

First of all, an overall score is given for each photo. The score is based on the image’s attractiveness, how it represents the content of the image, whether there is a good composition and if the moment is represented accurately.

Following this, you are shown individual scores for each section that may require attention. These include exposure, focus, framing, colors and people or objects in an image. If you see any sections with a score of 0, it means that the photo has failed to pass. However, if you see a section with a score of 5, it means that the photo is excellent and should be kept.

The next step in the process is to cull from the selection that Aftershoot has made. I make my selects and remove flags and stars from photos that I wouldn’t pick myself. This is where I can use my own eye to check for errors. Once culling is complete, it’s time to edit – using the AI saves us so much time.

Aftershoot has become an integral part of my editing process. As a wedding photographer, any amount of time saved in post-processing is a winner. The AI has been trained on over three million images, which means it knows what is important in a photo before you do.

Do I entirely trust the AI to cull a whole wedding? Not necessarily – I still go through and hand-cull from the selections. I also shuffle through and double-check that nothing important has been missed. Every AI has its flaws, but Aftershoot does a darn good job at being selective.

The best part is that it saves so much time. No more sifting through hundreds of images just to find the one I’m looking for. Sometimes, I spend several hours post-processing per wedding, so being able to cull my favourites in under an hour means less time spent looking at these images straight after a long day.

Aftershoot is an app that I would recommend to any wedding photographer. It’s easy to use and the AI does a great job at culling the best images. Time-saving is essential in our line of work, and Aftershoot delivers just that.

Thinking of giving Aftershoot a try? Use my referral link for 10% off your subscription.