Simon took this photo of a glass sphere on a white background with colored lights. No AI was used in this photo.
Artificial Intelligence has rapidly become part of many aspects of our modern lives, and in many ways feels almost inescapable. AI is also increasingly involved in visual arts: photos, videos, posters, presentations, infographics, simple clip-art...almost anything visual can be altered, or entirely created, through the use of AI tools. Regardless of how you choose to use AI, it's important for me to let you know how we use it in my workflow for client photography.
The short version is that we simply do not use AI for client photography, except in a few specific cases which we will explain below. We do not use AI editing tools: all of the culling, sorting, selecting, and managing of your photos is done by me, by hand, in Adobe Lightroom Classic. We do not use AI enhancements, filters, tweaks, or techniques when working on your images. We do not use AI to enlarge photos and add elements beyond the edges of the frame. We do not use AI to alter facial expressions, change backgrounds, turn gray skies into sunny days, generate elements that didn't exist when the photo was taken, or anything else along those lines. To list all the ways in which we do not use AI would take pages upon pages and still fall short, but my guiding principle is this: when you hire Stevens Creek Photography for your photos, you are getting years of experience combined with the physics of a camera and lens.
However, there are three specific cases in which we do use AI in order to deliver photographs that you and your loved ones will treasure for years:
Denoise: In some low-light situations, especially near sunset, we have to raise the sensitivity (also known as ISO) of the image sensor in my camera in order to get a good photo. This usually results in photos that have noise and grain--almost like microscopic grains of sand scattered all across the image. We use Adobe Lightroom Classic to process client photos, and its AI Denoise feature does a phenomenal job of cleaning up high-ISO shots and making them look clean and crisp.
DISTRACTION REMOVAL: We do a lot of on-location photography for clients, which means that it's not uncommon to have things in the shot that shouldn't be there in the first place: bits of litter, a forgotten toy, etc. The Generative Remove tool in Lightroom works well to make distracting things disappear, and when needed, we will use it to clean up shots where small objects are in the photo that shouldn't really be there in the first place.
AI MASKING: This one is a bit more on the technical side and isn't something that most people would notice or even know about, but I'm disclosing it here in the interest of full transparency. Lightroom has the ability to use AI to create masks (i.e. areas of a photo where edits can be applied that do not affect the rest of the image) that can speed up the editing process. For example, Lightroom can create a mask that applies only to the eyes, teeth, face, or other part of a portrait. The actual edits are done manually, but using AI to create the initial mask dramatically reduces the editing time.