A Case Study & Review of Batch ai from a Wedding Photographer
Can Artificial Intelligence substantially speed up your photo editing workflow?
We put Batch ai to the test during our busy wedding season.
Check out this article here for our latest Ai photo culling and editing workflow.
If, like me, your previous understanding of AI or Artificial Intelligence, was largely based off watching the 2004, blockbuster I, Robot you may be pleasantly surprised to learn that robots aren’t going to destroy the world as you know it (not yet anyway) and on a much happier note, AI can help speed up your editing process and give you back time.
I (Jessie) am the chief photo editor at Trent and Jessie HQ, AI photo editing caught my attention earlier this year and for the last couple of months I have been testing out Batch ai, a photo editing Lightroom plugin powered by artificial intelligence. Batch ai’s catch phrase, “edit less, live more”, sounds pretty good to me, but how much time could I actually save with the help of AI?
To determine just how helpful this superhuman editing ai could be I decided to put it to the test during our busiest months of the year, September and October. Could Batch ai help me stay on top of editing during the Spring wedding season? To conduct the test I would grab my stop watch every time I sat down to edit in Lightroom for the months of September and October and see how long it would take to edit, from the moment I hit that develop tab to being ready to export. Every second wedding I would use Batch ai and every other wedding I was on my own.
Here are the results…
Wedding 1 (batch), number of photos: 940, edit time: 4hrs
Wedding 2 (no ai), number of photos: 771, edit time: 4hrs 47min
Wedding 3 (batch), number of photos: 763, edit time: 2hrs 52min
Wedding 4 (no ai), number of photos: 798, edit time: 5hrs 38min
Wedding 5 (batch), number of photos: 707, edit time: 2hrs 55min
Wedding 6 (no ai), number of photos: 727, edit time: 4hrs 19min
Wedding 7 (batch), number of photos: 800, edit time: 3hrs 13min
Average time per photo without ai: 23 seconds
Average time per photo with Batch ai: 14.5 seconds
Multiplied by an approximate average of 750 photos per wedding
Wedding edited with ai: 3 hours 2 minutes
Wedding edited without ai: 4 hours 48 minutes
In conclusion I can potentially save approximately 1 hour and 46 minutes, which is 37% quicker than editing without batch ai.
Now, let me elaborate on my process of editing with Batch ai a little more. Something I really enjoy about Batch ai is that it integrates easily into my Lightroom classic workflow. I simply download the latest version of the plugin, open Lightroom and add Batch to my plugin manager. I then sort my photos by filename, so that photos taken on the same camera are grouped together. I have a quick scan of all the photos and apply a green label to the first photo in a sequence of the same or similar lighting scenario. After scanning the full collection, I filter by label to show only the images I have labelled green and I get to work editing each of these, taking my time to get the settings just right, as this becomes my reference or anchor image for Batch ai to know how to edit the photos that follow until it encounters the next image that is labeled green. Once I am happy with my anchor images I go to File > Plug-in Extras > batch.ai, make sure my Anchor Marker is set to Colour Label (Green), tick Exclude Black And White, then hit Run batch.ai and let Batch do it’s thing.
Amazingly, Batch ai can fine tune 1000 photos in 1 minute. The latest masking tools in Lightroom, can also be replicated but this does slow down the editing process marginally. Batch ai is not simply copy and pasting my previous settings, it is analysing the reference image and fine tuning colours, white balance, exposure, highlights, shadows, all the things, even straightening, cropping and as previously mentioned masking.
As I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to editing, I wasn’t going to place all my confidence in artificial intelligence, I still took the time to check every single image and input any necessary real intelligence if you will, and sprinkle my own artistic preference. When using Batch ai, I found that I rarely needed to tweak the exposure and white balance, I was usually just cropping and doing minor retouching.
Final thoughts
Will we start to using Batch ai to help edit all our weddings? Here are my thoughts…
Potential to save more time - there’s no question that it certainly time. If I was less of a perfectionist and didn’t need to check every image and if the lighting conditions were more constant throughout a shoot, then editing would be complete as soon as Batch works it’s magic, which of course would save so much time.
Reducing overwhelm - not to be overlooked or under appreciated is that with Batch successfully editing the majority of images, meaning only minor tweaks are needed if any, my overwhelm at editing hundreds of images is significantly reduced. Mental fatigue is something that certainly plays into editing and reducing that makes a big difference in my opinion. As I’m not getting as tired from editing when using Batch ai, I’m finding that I can completely edit a wedding in a day rather than space the editing out over multiple days, which is what I tend to do when editing on my own.
Flexible pricing - Batch ai offers endlessly flexible pricing, so you can go up and down in pricing tiers depending on your workload - ramp it up during wedding season then drop back in your quiet periods or even pause the subscription. This is certainly appealing.
After doing this study for myself I’m leaning towards permanently incorporating Batch ai into our editing workflow. The team at Batch ai are also super helpful and responsive and they are constantly making improvements to the software, so I’m very keen to see how ai photo-editing evolves.
Thanks for reading, I hope you found this article helpful.
Jessie x
*Full disclosure the button above is an affiliate link and we will get a small commission if you decide to use Batch ai after your 500 image free trial.
