Today I bring you a hilarious photoshoot challenge called The Walmart Photo Shoot. Pye Jirsa and I battle head to head to see who can take the best looking images all while using $100 worth of clothing bought from Walmart. To make it even harder, none of the images can be Photoshopped either!
Over the years, Lee and I have produced some pretty epic photoshoot battles with some of our closest friends in the photo industry. Somehow through nearly a decade of friendship, I have never actually gone up against my good friend Pye Jirsa one on one...until now. Most of you know Pye as one of the founders of the photography blog SLR Lounge but he's also one of the most successful and in-demand wedding photographers in the United States through his company Lin and Jirsa Weddings.
Recently, Pye's other photography venture, Visual Flow, teamed up with DVLOP to create Impossible Things, the most powerful automated raw image editor I've ever seen. Using your own favorite Lightroom preset, Impossible Things automatically adjusts every single one of your boring straight out of camera raw files, and up to 90% of the images are edited accurately enough to deliver. Regardless if you use a preset you've designed on your own or use one of the dozens of free cloud styles included with the plugin, Impossible Things' sophisticated Predictive Ai Engine will not only edit your raw files in your own desired style, but it will also drastically improve the color, contrast, dynamic range, and clarity depending on the scene, lighting conditions, subject matter, and a whole host of things. To put it simply, Impossible Things basically takes all the complex editing that defines your own look and applies it flawlessly to every image regardless of all the complex shooting situations presented throughout your entire shoot.
Here is a quick before and after to show you what Impossible Things did to one of my wedding images.
When Pye first told me about this automated Ai editing engine, it sounded way too good to be true. To prove just how powerful this new editing tool was, Pye suggested that he could fly down to Puerto Rico and build me my own custom "cloud style" so I never have to waste time tweaking images in Lightroom again. Offer accepted!
With Pye flying down to Puerto Rico, I wanted to set up a unique photography shootout that would have a difficult twist to it. I've had this idea of trying to shoot professional looking advertisement images using only clothing found at Walmart. To make things even more difficult, I thought it would be fun to style two models, Gustavo and Jennifer Janer, and set a maximum budget of just $100 for each photographer. Pye loved the idea but also wanted to add a twist of his own. In this photoshoot challenge, we could only edit our images using our own Impossible Things cloud style. No Photoshop was allowed. We would both be at the mercy of our automated, Ai cloud styles.
Before we could begin the challenge, we obviously had to build my own custom cloud style from scratch. Pye and I spent about 3 days recording all of the little nuances I do to every one of my images. Pye is a Lightroom and color theory master, and he noticed all the little details I was doing over and over again like pushing the red in my skin tones a little towards the yellow hue. He also noticed I rarely crush my blacks, but I'm always lifting my shadows while adding contrast in my upper mid tones. I almost always pull down my highlights but boost my whites just a touch. Overall I hate the overuse of the clarity slider, but I still add just a touch of clarity in most of my work. I also love to over-sharpen my images, but then I use a very aggressive mask to hide everything except the most impactful lines of contrast in my images. Pye even noticed how I often create a subtle magenta shift on all the greens in my images, especially any greens falling on my subject's skin.
It sounded absurd to think that I truly edit all of my images exactly the same way, but at the end of those 3 days, Pye had created a cloud style that now replicates the editing look I apply to most of my work. Now I can simply highlight any number of images in Lightroom, apply my "Hudson" cloud style, and the resulting edit is 90% of the way done. The only tweaks I find myself doing are adjusting the overall exposure by about 1/3rd a stop up or down, and maybe tweaking the WB slider a little cooler or warmer depending on my mood. Everything else is spot on! It's absolutely brilliant and I still can't believe how well it works. As a test I've even manually edited a virtual copy first and then run my cloud style on a separate copy. Every single time the Impossible Things Ai render looks better than the edit I spent 2-5 minutes on. It's very impressive to say the least.
You can watch the full shoot out video above to see how Pye and I styled our models, picked out our favorite locations, and all the funny heckling we used to distract each other. Below are the final image sets we both submitted. I won't tell you who won in this article (you'll have to watch the video for the final outcome), but feel free to give your opinions on these two sets in the comments below. Even though our two shooting styles are very different, I feel pretty confident that we both made our Walmart wardrobes look better than either of us could have imagined!
I've been a professional photographer for almost 20 years at this point, and while I love editing my favorite final select images from a shoot, I do not enjoy culling and editing huge sets of images taken throughout the entire day. About a decade ago I came to the realization that my time was better spent outsourcing the culling and color grading of my images so I could focus more of my time on the aspects of my business that I truly enjoy. Outsourcing your work means you gain more free time, but you are now paying a hefty dollar to pay someone for those services. The dream has always been to have my specific editing style applied automatically to all of my images and for the exposure, white balance, color, and clarity to be perfect. Well I'm excited to say, that day has come.
Below are a few before and after images from my portfolio. The image on the left is the raw file straight out of camera and the image on the right has been run through Impossible Things using my cloud style "Hudson."
As you look through these examples, notice how the Ai algorithm is fixing the exposure, playing with the skin tones, and adjusting the saturation depending on the scene itself. It's not simply throwing a "preset recipe" on all of these raw images; it is dynamically adjusting the recipe depending on the exposure, lighting conditions, natural light vs strobe light, and a whole host of other criteria.
Regardless of who ultimately won the Walmart Photo Challenge, I am more excited about having a cloud style that can now replicate my entire editing style with the click of a button. It's also a huge time saver that everything is built directly into Lightroom, which means I don't have to export my raw files into a 3rd party application and re-import them back into Lightroom to batch them out. It's one program, one plugin, one batch process, and everything is done automatically.
If you want to try Impossible Things for free, click the image above and test the algorithm on a few hundred of your own images. You can apply any of the cloud styles to your own images and even re-edit the same images multiple times with different cloud styles.
The pricing model of Impossible Things comes in 3 tiers:
- Pay As You Go ($.07 per image)
- Annual Pro ($.05 per image)
- Unlimited (as many photos are you want for $49 a month).
I was spending about $300-400 per wedding to outsource my own edits, so you can do the math pretty easily. If I were to only use the Pay As You Go option, 5000 images from a wedding comes out to $350 which is competitive to what I was paying to hire my editor. The best deal is by far spending $49 a month and knocking out all your weddings, family sessions, events, and portrait sessions month to month. The great thing about Impossible Things is I don't have to waste time by mailing or uploading all my wedding files and then downloading the sidecar files again at the end of the process. Impossible Things can churn through everything right on my desktop while I get other work done.
This is a complete game changer when it comes to pairing up Ai editing with your pre existing Lightroom presets, and with all the amazing technology and preset development through their partners like DVLOP, Visual Flow, and REFINED Co, the options and results are only going to get better with time.
