In the past few years, culling photos has become A LOT easier than it would have been thanks to AI advancements in the photo industry space.
Earlier photographers, especially wedding photographers, had to go through thousands of RAW photos that took seconds to load and zoom in on every face or detail to see if it was perfect and in focus.
Imagine doing that with 5-10 duplicates of the same moment captured, such as a bride and groom kissing or throwing the bouquet at a wedding.
Thankfully now the AI can detect human faces, expressions, blinks, blurs, etc, and cull your photos automatically based on such parameters, or if the photographers want to make the choices themselves, the AI assists them in making effective and faster decisions to cull photos.
This is a huge win for wedding photographers who shoot an average of 3000 photos per session with dozens of duplicate photos to go through. Now photographers can cull among duplicates easily using AI Photo Culling software such as FilterPixel.
FilterPixel is available for Mac and Windows both and runs on cloud so there are no minimum requirements for PC/ Laptop.
How To Use FilterPixel AI To Cull Your Photos?
Creating A New Project
The first step is to create a new project by importing all the photos into FilterPixel that need to be culled and selecting a category based on the type of shoot the photographer did.
FilterPixel currently offers three categories:
- Portraits
- Weddings
- Others
Based on these categories, the AI will reject and select your photos looking at multiple parameters such as aesthetic, eye quality, focus quality, etc. (The FilterPixel team is soon working on introducing more categories.)
The First Pass
After the project is created, the AI goes through all the photos that you have imported and does the First Pass.
During the first pass, which takes an average of 20 minutes for 3000 photos, the AI will tag all the photos as rejects that have issues such as closed eyes, out of focus, bad composition or facial expressions, etc.
During this time, photographers can either start selecting their favorite pictures or rejecting the bad shots manually by pressing ‘P’ or ‘X’ respectively, or they can go grab a coffee to relax while AI does its job.
AI Photo Culling
After the first pass is done, the AI will classify your photos into three piles.
The Unlabelled pile helps photographers see all the good photos that are not having any issues like out of focus, face blurriness, closed eyes, composition, lighting, etc.
The Rejects pile helps photographers see all the photos with closed eyes, out-of-focus shots, or bad expressions.
And finally, the ‘Accepted’ pile is for the best photos. These photos should go in your final selections.
The AI does not accept any photo until photographers click on the ‘AutoSelect’ button. Photographers can accept their photos manually and can also have the AI select the best photos for them.
After clicking on autoselect, the AI accepts all the best photos among its duplicates based on multiple parameters such as expression, eye quality, focus quality, composition, etc.
Other AI Features:
FilterPixel also provides multiple features such as Face Views, Survey Mode, Comparison mode, and AI Sliders to help photographers review the best photos among the duplicates easily. Let’s take a look at what they do:
The Face views panel automatically zooms in on the human faces present in the photos so photographers don’t have to waste their time and effort zooming in every time on every photo.
Another amazing feature of FilterPixel for burst shooters is survey mode. Survey mode is for photos with multiple duplicates. This feature enables photographers to see all the duplicate photos at once and also zoom in at once on every photo.
Comparison mode helps photographers to compare and review two duplicate photos at once along with their face views and focus quality scores. Photographers use this when they cannot decide between two or more photos.
To quickly cull photos based on focus quality or eye quality, photographers can use Focus sliders and Eye sliders respectively, to filter out photos based on a certain focus or eye quality.
For example: If you want to see photos with more than 80% focus quality, you can drag the focus slider to 80% and every photo with 80% or more will appear on the screen.
All these features make it easier for photographers to review and make sure they are selecting only their best work in less amount of time without losing any control.
Rating Photos
Photographers can accept or reject their photos using keyboard shortcuts that are the same as Lightroom Classic shortcuts, i.e, P for accepting photos and X for rejecting photos. The star rating and color rating are also the same as Lightroom.
Exporting Photos
FilterPixel easily fits in the workflow of photographers as it provides a direct export option into Lightroom classic or Hard drive.
Users can also simply drag and drop photos from FilterPixel to any photo management software such as google photos, apple photos, or any other photo editing software.
Use Case
Alim Haque is a portrait photographer based in London. Before using FilterPixel, Alim was importing all the photos into Lightroom. Lightroom worked like a snail in generating previews & on top of that was not smart enough to analyze photos with issues such as eye & focus quality.
How FilterPixel Helps Alim?
Fast Import: FilterPixel is lightning fast in generating previews. So, even without AI, it works better than lightroom and any other software to select RAW files. After the shoot, Alim puts all his photos into FilterPixel & lets the AI do all his work for a few minutes.
Automate And Review: FilterPixel AI Filtering checks eye quality, focus quality, and more parameters & classifies images into unlabelled and rejects quickly. This helps Alim to spend more time on quality shots & to spend no time on the bad ones.
Seamless Integration To The Current Workflow: After reviewing & finalizing selections, Alim can take only the selected photos to Lightroom for editing, hence saving time by ingesting fewer files into Lightroom.
Conclusion
Photographers around the world are now smartly using AI in their workflow to do their photo culling using FilterPixel. They have experienced up to a 50% increase in their culling speed and seem to be even enjoying the culling process now.
With a 14-day free trial, photographers can try AI culling themselves for free and save time in culling their photos in front of their computer!
