While tools like Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo are great Swiss Army knives for photographers, sometimes a more specialized tool is called for. In this artificial intelligence-driven age, two new tools on the block, Aperty and Evoto, leverage this technology and aim it squarely at portrait photographers. Which one is better?
New Jersey-based portrait and wedding photographer Omar Gonzalez aims to answer that question by putting the two to the test and seeing which one works better for portrait editing.
At first glance, when using both pieces of software, cranking the sliders to remove blemishes, acne, eye bags, etc., results in the typical AI look—that is, over-smoothed and fake-looking. But dial it down just a little bit, and if the examples in the video are to be believed, things start looking pretty good. Things that would have taken hours in Photoshop happen in a flash.
What are some of the key differences in the software? Well, for one, Gonzalez demonstrates that Evoto is the more capable photo editor, being able to remove blemishes from bodies as well as target stray hairs for removal. Aperty, in its current incarnation, isn't capable of such wizardry. There's also a little bit of up-and-down with cloud processing in Aperty that slows things down, which isn't present in Evoto. Gonzalez demonstrates this in real time in his video.
There's also the matter of how the different applications handle payment. Evoto works on a credit-based system, letting you edit photos to your heart's content but charging you to export them with the changes. You can pay as you go with credits or purchase a subscription that grants you a set number of credits that roll over if you don't use them. Currently, the Evoto site is offering 800-credit yearly plans for $80 (called the "starter" plan) all the way to the Standard Plus plan with 24,000 credits for $1,205 per year. If you use these on many photos, like, say, for an entire wedding, you can burn through credits very quickly, as my colleague Jason Vinson pointed out in his review of Evoto. Aperty charges $199 for a one-year subscription, and there’s no export limit.
While the last thing photographers need is another subscription-based service, if this is something you regularly need, it might be worth it.
Check out the video above for Gonzalez's detailed thoughts on the software.
I think Evoto's credit plan is really dumb, I don't want to be working on a big job and thinking about how many credits I'm using.
Yeah, it seems like a poor way to handle it, but here we are, the land of 2024 where video games and productivity software all work on credits, subscriptions, etc.
I would take a regular subscription model over the credit system