There’s plenty of AI built into Lightroom, but a photo-editing competitor called Polarr Next hopes to get ahead with an application of the technology Adobe hadn’t thought of yet. Its Lightroom clone learns from how you edit photos to try to anticipate what you want and apply that to other shots.
Lightroom, widely used among professional and enthusiast photographers, employs AI for tasks like removing noise, taking its best shot at exposure and other editing settings, and selecting people or other subjects. That’s all useful, but software that can learn from your edits and know what you want to do is arguably more important.
The company launched version 1.0 of its Polarr Next software for beta testing on Monday. I gave it a whirl, and it works: I created a particular look for the pale orange mesas of Los Alamos, New Mexico, marked it as a “reference edit,” and watched the look spread to similar photos from the same shoot.
“As you train this AI more and more, it will remember and then be able to reapply that again and again down the road,” said Polarr Chief Executive Borui Wang said in an exclusive interview.
That kind of automation holds a lot of potential for people like wedding photographers, who are under fierce pressure to edit hundreds of photos on a tight deadline. And that kind of help is why so many developers are racing to embrace artificial intelligence.
Wang and his developers have convinced some early customers — professional wedding and portrait photographers who are the company initial market — to sign up for a $600 annual subscription to the software.
“That’s around five times more expensive than Lightroom, and these are people who have been using Lightroom for over a decade,” Wang said. But they wanted something that would let them get finished JPEGs to their clients sooner, he added. “They’ve been just so tired about the slowness.”
Polarr has put some thought into its AI abilities. You can start with a variety of presets from the company, and you…
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