How AI is Revolutionising Photo Editing: A Look at the Latest Tools

This guide will take a look at how the latest AI tools are revolutionising photo editing.

We’ll take a look at the latest and greatest AI photo editing techniques and tools and see how you can benefit from using them.

You can enjoy the convenience of fast and professional image enhancement, adjusting light balance, contrast, and color instantly.

Using AI, you can also change an object’s color, add digital elements, and even remove buildings, backgrounds and people seamlessly.

Who wouldn’t want AI to do the heavy lifting? It gives the photographer time to focus on their desired creative direction.

Let’s jump in.

Photo Editing AI Revolution

To stay ahead of the image enhancement game, you’ll want to know which tools are cutting-edge. Today, AI is at the forefront of image editing.

You might resist being part of the AI revolution, preferring to stick with traditional techniques.

However, traditional photography post-processing requires an in-depth knowledge of photo editing tools and techniques. But more importantly, it’s time-consuming, requires concentration, and an expert eye.

AI photo editing, in contrast, will save you time fiddling with saturation and adjusting light balance sliders to perfect an image’s look.

Another plus to AI editing is that it will keep you up to date and inspired by the current photography trends.

I started my journey with photography in the darkroom. And I’ve been using Photoshop and Lightroom for decades.

At first, the thought of handing my editing tasks to AI shook me. Was my editing career over? Were all my hard-earned skills useless?

It’s like being asked unexpectedly to retire before you’ve reached retirement age and without the promised pot of gold.

Then I revised my perspective. After all, it won’t be AI that takes over the world, it will be those using AI.

So, I changed my approach: if you can’t run from the beast, face it head-on, take it by the reins, and tame it.

I’ve learnt a thing or two about AI over the last couple of years, and now I happily use it to facilitate and lighten my workflow. I can say that it has helped tremendously both time-wise and creatively.

There’s a range of image-enhancing elements that I now take advantage of. When designing creatively, I use AI to add objects, generate backgrounds, and even animate image components.

If I need to adjust the saturation or lighting of a single image, I will often default to Photoshop and manual editing.

However, I am increasingly handing this task over to AI for batch editing, as I can see that I can trust AI to make fast and professional alterations.

Read on, and I will show you how to harness and use AI’s phenomenal knowledge and skills to your advantage.

• More: What is the Best AI Photo Editing Software?

AI Photo Edits – Light and Color Adjustments

A famous quote attributed to Miroslav Tichy, a Czech artist, says, “Photography is painting with light.”

Light adjustments are an essential post-production photography edit. A slight lighting change can turn a drab photo into a masterpiece.

Back in the dark ages, when the darkroom was the only option for editing, photo editors could spend hours painstakingly editing photos.

When an area of a photo was blown out, such as the sky, it would have to be isolated via cardboard cutouts. Only then could a light adjustment be made.

(Read about the history of photo editing here.)

This task could be tedious and time-consuming, requiring skill, precision, and many paper trial strips.

I know because I lived in the time (long ago) before digital cameras.

When digital cameras and photo editing software arrived, they revolutionised the world of imagery for the first time since the birth of photography.

Photo editing software sped up the editing process. However, it took time, skill, and expert photo editing knowledge.

Then AI enters the editing stage, flashy, irresistible, and boldly capable.

No longer does the person editing the photo need to know anything about light and photo editing. They only need to know what creative direction they want to head in.

Do they want to create a soft, whimsical image or a wild and vividly colorful scene?

Editing software with AI batch editing capabilities, such as Aftershoot, Zapier, and Lightroom, can edit numerous photos in mere moments.

AI-powered algorithms will adjust the photos, light balance, contrast, exposure, and color.

Alterations are made to create a balanced look across an entire album based on your chosen editing style.

Below are examples of AI editing, completed using Lightroom’s AI plugin, Batch AI.

If the style in your Lightroom catalog is rich mood tones with an emphasis on drama, Lightroom’s AI batch edits will reflect this.

AI batch editing is fantastic as it automates repetitive tasks, applying edits to multiple photos to keep a consistent look.

If you wish to create a fresh, alternate look, such as bold tones for a more dynamic feel,  you can train the software’s AI to replicate other editing styles.

This is incredibly useful if you need to seamlessly elevate the look of your photos, giving them a premium look.

AI batch edits aren’t only good for applying exposure, contrast, and color adjustments. It will also cull photos, such as blurry photos, duplicates, or photos where people have their eyes closed.

Photo editing software with AI batch editing capabilities is invaluable to photographers who process hundreds of photos a week, helping to streamline their workflow.

Professional photographers used to outsource their post-production editing, but now they can keep it in-house.

• More: Which AI Image Enhancers Are Best?

AI Photo Edits – Reduce Blur, Repair, and Upscale

Online AI photo editing software, such as Cutout Pro, Nero AI, and Vance AI, can repair torn images.

They can also remove noise, sharpen low-resolution photos, and enhance image clarity.

To repair a photo, simply upload it to the platform and click the “Repair” button. The AI quickly analyzes the damage and restores missing or faded areas—often with surprisingly accurate results.

(Check out this review of the best AI photo restorers.)

Some tools go further by intelligently reconstructing parts of an image, such as facial features or background details, using generative AI.

These platforms can also upscale images, reduce blur, and improve overall quality. Upload your photo, select “Upscale,” and the enhanced version is typically ready in seconds.

It’s worth noting that tools designed to reconstruct missing or heavily damaged image areas use AI generation, which is more advanced than traditional AI editing. While AI photo editing enhances what’s already there, AI generation creates new visual content based on learned patterns.

• More: Best AI Image Generators for iPhone & Android

AI Photo Edits – Presets

One of the most common edits wedding photographers make is adding a unique signature look to their photo albums.

This often involves adjusting color tones, lighting balance, and contrast before applying a custom filter.

To create a vintage wedding aesthetic, photographers typically reduce saturation. In contrast, boosting saturation can produce a bold, retro-inspired vibe.

In the past, each image had to be tweaked individually to give the wedding album a consistent, coherent aesthetic.

Adjusting the temperature and sliding the white balance for the perfect lighting and to achieve soft, natural skin tones on each photo is time-consuming.

When the preset was developed, photographers could add a consistent aesthetic to their photo albums using their own signature preset.

Presets might seem like an AI edit because they can be applied with a single click, but don’t be fooled.

Usually, presets are a combination of editing adjustments recorded as set steps in the photography software.

However, now photo editing software integrates with AI to offer adaptive presets, which allow the photographer to avail of AI’s intelligent adjustments.

AI adaptive presets apply a set of adjustments and edits. However, AI can select, adjust, and separate elements to edit them individually, specific to each photo’s needs.

In wedding photos and portraits, it’s vital that the natural skin tones are enhanced to create beautiful, soft tones.

So it’s essential that AI does not apply the editing steps until it has analyzed the image to see if it needs an adapted adjustment.

Because AI is well-trained and intelligent, it won’t just slap the edit on without weighing up the pixels, lighting, and content of the image.

This is a phenomenal development in editing that allows wedding photographers (and others) the breathing time to focus on taking the most inspired content.

Before AI, you could use Photoshop’s Actions to apply recorded edits to each photo. Like Presets, Actions can be saved and reapplied to all images.

AI helps wedding photographers to effortlessly and efficiently add their unique style to create emotive edits that help highlight the romantic mood.

Golden glow, classic chic, romantic vibes, and sepia tones are all achieved by a quick click using trained AI.

Getting the edits perfect is important, as an album is an heirloom to be passed down to future generations so that they can see the special moments.

• More: Best AI Image Styles

AI Photo Edits – Selecting Objects and Elements

For decades, photo editing software like Photoshop has made it easy for photographers and designers to edit creatively.

Photoshop has always had the option to select image components so that photo editors can edit items separately.

Depending on the intricacy of the selection, this could be a very finicky and time-consuming task.

I remember painstakingly creating selections down to the pixel level on a lace photo. A process that took me hours would now take a millisecond.

Selection editing tools have become completely automated with the onset of AI-driven updates.

Online photo editing software such as Cutout Pro, Luminar Neo, Pixelcut, and Canva can select and remove an item in seconds.

Although AI is incredibly fast, it has shortcomings and sometimes selects too much or too little of an object.

When this happens, if precision is essential, it will be necessary to manually edit and correct the selection.

Photoshop, unlike other AI-adapted image editing software, allows the editor the most control over the final tweaks of the selection.

Selections are created when a photo editor wants to remove or edit an item separately, such as alter colors in a specific area.

Today, most photo editing software has an incorporated AI selection tool, making it easy for editors to create a selection automatically.

To use an AI selection tool, find the software selection tool and click on the item to select it. In Photoshop, the AI selection tools are in the top menu bar under Selection.

AI Photo Edits – Adding Digital Backgrounds & Elements

With the incorporation of AI into editing software, photo editors can easily create fantastic or surreal images. Images that keep the viewer intrigued and captivated.

Another AI photo editing trick is to generate elements or backgrounds for your portrait.

Automated image enhancement allows photographers to focus on the content without worrying about the more tiresome editing details.

Stable Diffusion, Leonardo AI, and Photoshop are photo editing software that incorporate a generative fill tool.

The generative fill tool can create objects or elements from word prompts. These elements can then be added to a photo.

This means an editor can create a lantern, a fox, or any element they desire using AI editing software such as Photoshop.

You can find a tutorial on how to use Photoshop’s generative fill here.

This is a fantastic option when a designer needs one item but doesn’t have the time to search the internet to find it.

However, when using this AI feature, I have found that the creations won’t always match my idea. A fox might be positioned at the wrong angle, the tree might not have enough leaves, etc.

However, it’s still a valuable tool to have at one’s disposal.

• More: Best AI Tools for Background Generation

AI Photo Edits – Words To Images

AI-generated images, such as word-to-image prompts, are at the cutting edge of AI technology. This type of photo generation relies on in-depth machine learning.

Some would argue that this is not photo editing, as AI generates an entirely new image and excludes the prompter from giving input other than words.

However, if it’s used as a backdrop to a photo, it could be considered part of the editing process.

Some top AI word prompt background creators to try are Cutout Pro, Luminar Neo, Photoshop, Canva, Leonardo AI, and Freepik.

To use them, you can hop onto their website and add a prompt. Seconds later, your image will be created, ready to download.

• More: The Best Way to Write AI Art Prompts

Conclusion

At the end of the day, speed is the number one advantage of AI photo edits. You might be the fastest editor in town, but AI will beat you pixels down every time.

Who can say no to having their images edited in a fraction of a second?

Yes, we can all learn how to edit photos precisely and create incredible, breathtaking images, but how long would it take?

We all know that eye-catching images are no longer a plus; they’re essential for making an impression online.

Some businesses need to create visual content to share online on a daily basis.

Influencers and businesses can use AI photo editing to save time, allowing them to unleash their creativity without learning photo editing skills.

Professional photographers can rely on AI editing to complete tasks they previously had to outsource.

This allows for time, creativity, and experimenting, where endless possibilities can be explored and captivating results created.

AI photo editing delivers sophisticated, consistent, and professional results, so who wouldn’t want to use it?

Plus, AI is constantly improving algorithms, features, and developing tools.

It’s exciting times to live in when AI is eternally evolving. I wonder where it will take us next.