Speed Up Your Culling and Editing With Aftershoot PRO and EDITS

Over 20 years of digital photography produced 80,000 images. Culling is a time-consuming, tedious process that I’ve neglected. Consequently, my hard drives and cloud storage are bloated. Can Aftershoot PRO help me lighten the load?

AI has a lot of bad press with criticisms I greatly sympathize with. But if used to our advantage, it can be incredibly beneficial for speeding up our workflow. Aftershoot PRO does that.

It caught my eye because it has also released a beta version of the new Aftershoot Edits, again using AI. This time it works with Lightroom to adjust photos to match your style. Abandoning caution, I decided to let it get to work on my catalog to reduce the clutter and see if it could apply my styles to different photoshoots.

The Culling Workflow

You start by “Ingesting” your photos into the program and onto your working hard drive. (Ingest is synonymous with import.) As with most software, you can choose where you want the photos imported. You can also add a secondary location for backing up your photos. There is also the option to rename the files and retain the folder structure from the memory card.

Similarly, you can import images already on your internal or external storage.

After import, you click on the Start Culling button. This opens the Set Preferences window, where you can choose the thresholds you want to apply. This means the software allows you to decide how rigorously to cull your images according to various parameters you can set.

The first of those parameters is blurred photos. The great thing is that even if multiple similar images are blurred, the program will leave you with one of those. There are three levels from which you can choose: Strict, Moderate, and Lenient. The strict setting will cull all images where the images are unsharp. So, if you only want to keep the pin-sharp images, choose that. At the other end of the scale, the Lenient setting will only exclude those photos that are completely out of focus. So, if you shoot with a very shallow depth of field or perhaps use a soft-focus lens, then the lenient setting may be the best choice. Moderate, of course, falls between those alternatives.

The second parameter is the Grouping of Duplicates. This has four settings: Lenient, Moderate, Strict, and Extreme. The Lenient setting will create new duplicate sets with the subtlest of changes between the images, so you keep more images. I can see this appealing to wildlife photographers who shot multiple frames of the same animal with only the slightest change between them. Strict will group more images together and will probably be employed by event photographers who will shoot many similar images. Moderate will, of course, fall between those settings. If you are trigger-happy, shoot far too many photos, and your camera fires off 120 frames a second like mine, then the Extreme setting may be best for you.

Selections in a Duplicate Set give you different percentages of images you have filtered that it will select to keep. Less is 10%, Moderate is 20%, and More is 30%.

Finally, the Volume of Sneak Previews suggests the images the program thinks will do well on social media. Again, you can choose a percentage of your photos that it selects in this way, from 0% to 20%.

Below are the advanced settings that allow you to turn off each of the three filters. So, I would switch off the blur detection for my abstract photos. For my seascape photography, there are dynamic features, like the positioning of the waves or gulls flying into the photos. I like to choose manually which I should keep. So, in that case, I would turn off the duplicates selection altogether.

Once you have applied the settings you wanted, you press the Start Culling button.

Depending upon the number of photos, the culling process takes a few minutes to process the images.

Once processed, you will see a grid of the selected images. In the top right-hand corner of the images in grid view is a number showing how many close duplicates of that photo there are.

I found the most useful feature was the Quick Filters on the right.

You can choose to see which photos are marked as duplicates, which are blurry, those containing subjects with closed eyes, and which have warnings. The Warnings tab organizes the images where a better version couldn't be found, but the program thinks there was a reason for the images being shot that way.

You can also restart the culling process and change the parameters if the cull is either too severe in its filtering or too tolerant of errors.

Clicking thumbnails will open the pictures in Loupe View so you can inspect the images more closely.

Like many other programs, there are many useful keyboard shortcuts. For example, G takes you to the grid View. X on the keyboard rejects images you don’t want to use. Keyboard shortcut A will swap the duplicates with the selected image. S will mark one as a selected photo that you want to save. There are plenty more too.

Looking in the duplicates folder, the image Aftershoot has decided to keep has a green tag and five stars. The duplicates are marked yellow with three stars. Other stars and colors have different meanings, and I won’t go through all of them here. However, it’s worth noting that you can reassign colors and stars to different groupings than those suggested by the program. Most photographers will have added star rankings to their images externally, and there is the option to overwrite those.

Once you have finished tweaking the image selections, clicking Save Changes writes the settings to sidecar files so other programs can read them. That takes a couple of seconds. Then that same button changes its function and allows you to Export the photos to either Lightroom, Capture One, or into a folder.

Developing Images With Aftershoot

Aftershoot has gone further because it can now automatically apply Lightroom Development settings to your photos based on your previous work. This is taking things beyond just using presets, which often require significant adjusting afterward.

Aftershoot studies your previous images. It then applies those settings to make your new pictures have the same style. For example, a wedding photographer may have a coherent look for outdoor bridal shots, so Aftershoot adjusts the settings for similar images to copy that style. For this to work, you upload your previously adjusted images directly from your Lightroom Catalog. Aftershoot’s AI uses that to create your own unique AI Profile. It then applies what it has learned from those previous photos to your new unadjusted pictures.

I tried this, and again it worked well for most images. Certainly, better than just applying a preset.

First Impressions: What I Liked and What Could Be Improved

I was impressed, especially so by the speed of the program, sorting through thousands of images in minutes and the accuracy of the suggested culls, which was near perfect. I swapped a couple of choices, but that was much faster than reviewing and manually comparing every shot. Culling is part of my workflow I enjoy the least. Culling is also costly for those who earn a living from photography.

Within minutes, it sorted through a wedding shoot, pulling out the same photos that I previously chose manually. A process that originally took me a couple of hours was done in under five minutes. It easily rejected those shots where someone had blinked or there was excessive motion blur.

Similarly, when applied to multiple seascapes, it worked well too. However, as I mentioned, with dynamic scenes that included moving waves and flying gulls, I needed to choose which of those photos I would keep based on my aesthetic preferences, which was not necessarily the choice Aftershoot made. However, I suspect the AI will learn those over time too.

I did try the EDITS module on my Lightroom-developed photos, and it worked well. However, more recently, I’ve changed to using DxO PhotoLab to develop my images, and I hope it will expand to include the development settings applied by that and other raw tools in time. Nevertheless, the culling does work with PhotoLab 6, as I can see the star ratings and color tags applied by Aftershoot. But it currently only allows the exporting of the sorted images into the Lightroom and Capture One catalogs. Hopefully, that will expand over time to include DxO PhotoLab and On1 Photo Raw.

The program runs directly on the computer and does not need an active or fast internet connection.

There is a free month’s trial of the Aftershoot, and then it is a subscription of $119.88 annually, which saves 30% off the monthly charge of $14.99 for the AI Culling. EDITS is currently in Beta and free for subscribers. On release, it will be a fixed fee, but the price is yet to be announced. In the meantime, you should get a 10% discount when you buy it by using this link to access the free trial.