Creating AI photos or using AI technology for photo editing may seem like Sci-Fi, but it’s right here for all of us to use in 2022.
From removing an image’s background to improving how a photo looks with just one click, artificial intelligence is both powerful and accessible.
In this guide, you’ll discover 12 of the most exciting AI tools for photographers to help us save time or simply have more fun!
Many of the tools are free, while others are well worth the investment – it’s truly incredible what they can do.
AI is here to stay and the technology is only going to get better and better. We really do live in exciting times 🙂
Let’s take a look at the recommendations.
13 AI Technology Powered Tools for Photographers
1. Luminar Neo: AI Image Editing Software
Luminar’s strongest suit has always been AI photo editing. In Luminar Neo, you’ll find an amazing array of tools that will enhance your photos in no time with spectacular results.
Here are the best features of Neo:
- Mask AI allows you to easily select specific parts of the image to make selective adjustments. It detects up to nine elements – sky, water, natural ground, artificial ground, mountains, buildings, vehicles, people, and plants. You can also fine-tune the mask.
- AI Sky not only replaces the sky for you, but it also creates the corresponding reflections and relights the scene to match the new sky. Augmented Sky inserts objects such as birds or the moon, matching them to the scene.
- Portrait Bokeh AI defocuses the background of your portraits to create a bokeh effect.
- Relight AI tool remaps your image, recreating a 3D space to spread the light naturally and change the light of the original photo.
- Composition AI crops and straightens your image to offer you the best possible framing.
- Portrait Background Removal AI uses Mask AI to remove the background on your portrait photos automatically.
- Face AI detects the face and features and allows you to do photo editing with one-click tools. There’s also Body AI for full-body portraits.
- Remove Powerlines AI removes power lines from the sky of your cityscapes. For more generic blemishes and dust, there’s also an AI tool.
See our complete Luminar Neo review for a deeper dive into this impressive software for editing your images.
2. Topaz Gigapixel AI: Increase Image Resolution
Gigapixel AI is a Topaz AI products designed to upscale your images up to 600%. If you’ve ever tried to enlarge a photo (increase image resolution), you know how difficult it is to do it and not end up with a pixelated, low-quality image – especially if you try to go very far beyond the original size.
Gigapixel AI uses deep learning to improve the quality and enhance the details of your photos as its upscaling them. This way, it delivers pictures that look like they were taken with a higher resolution.
You can use Gigapixel AI to zoom in and crop a detail from your original photo and enhance it to be ready to print or share. You’ll also be able to sharpen your images, get rid of compression artefacts, and more.
You can install and use Gigapixel AI as a stand-alone program, but you can also incorporate it into your workflow in Lightroom and Photoshop.
See our Gigapixel review for more examples of how you can use this AI technology on your photos.
3. AfterShoot: AI Image Culling
AfterShoot is a photo manager that uses AI to automate the tedious part of culling large series of pictures. As you know, culling is part of the photography business. It’s very time-consuming and can be pretty dull – unless you automate it.
Using AfterShoot, you can select the parameters (set stars and colors). Then, adjust the sensitivity from low to the extreme on different categories – such as grouping duplicates, culling blurred photos, etc. Now, let the program do the rest.
In the end, you can review and refine the culling before exporting or exporting the photos directly. AfterShoot is totally safe because it doesn’t upload your photos anywhere – it works locally on your computer.
See our AfterShoot review to see how far AI-powered photo culling has come and how you can use its tools.
4. Adobe Photoshop CC: Photo Editing Software with AI Tools
Adobe Photoshop is a powerful photo editing program that’s been the industry standard for decades. While it didn’t jump into the AI market immediately, it has increased the number of AI tools consistently with each upgrade.
Here are some of the tools that incorporate artificial intelligence:
- Content-Aware Fill – Using the content-aware fill, you can remove unwanted objects from a photo, and Photoshop will fill in the spaces, gathering information from other pixels.
- Quick selection/ Object selection/ Subject selection – Using these tools, you can easily and quickly select elements in your photos.
- Smile – Inside the Liquify filter, there’s a Face detection tool that allows identifying the face and features of the person in the portrait. You can modify them individually using sliders. One of these tools will enable you to make your subject smile.
And these are some of the new neural filters:
- Skin Smoothing – It has Blur and Smoothness sliders to retouch portraits.
- Style Transfer – You can transfer color, style, and texture from one picture to another. You can also choose a painter’s style and apply their style to your photo.
- Depth Blur – You can make a realistic effect of a narrow depth of field on any image.
- Colorize – This filter is to add color to black and white photos.
You’ll find the neural filters divided into Featured, Beta, and Wait List.
Featured are the approved filters that meet all of Adobe’s standards. Beta filters are available for testing, so the results aren’t always predictable.
The Wait List filters are still under development and not yet available – you can learn more about them and click the I’m Interested button to vote for your favorite.
5. Remove.bg: Remove Backgrounds with AI
If you’re looking for a background remover that uses AI to use with just one-click, then Remove.bg is for you. Simply upload your image and let it do its magic. You can help them improve by rating the resulting image.
You can download the preview (low resolution) or the HD version. The free account is recommended for personal use or testing because it gives you only one credit and 50 previews.
For commercial use, you can get a subscription plan – they have five choices from 40 credits to 2800, or you can pay as you go, which works out to be more expensive per photo.
6. Generated.Photos: AI Photos of People
If you need an AI-generated model, you can create one using generated.photos. You start with a random image proposed by the website and make the changes you need.
You can tweak all kinds of things, from the eye color to the emotion, from age to head pose, and end up with a completely different person.
While you don’t need a model release because they are not real people, you do need permission to use the images since they are copyrighted. In this case, the permission states that they are free if it’s for personal use, but you must give attribution with a link back to the website, and they are limited to 512 x 512.
For commercial use, you can subscribe to a monthly plan that allows 15 high-quality downloads, or you can buy in bulk. For the last option, the more you buy – the lower the price.
For example, from 1 to 20 photos, the cost is $2,99 each – however, as you increase the purchase, the price goes down to reach $1 per image when buying more than 1000. For paid plans, you don’t need to give attribution.
7. Deepart.io: Turn Photos into Artwork using Artificial Intelligence
Depart.io is a site that uses AI to apply the stylistic effect of artwork to your photo. It’s really easy to use. Just upload the photo, choose the style and submit.
If you’re doing it just for fun, you can do as many images as you want. Once you submit it, it will get in the queue and will be delivered to you at 500 x 500 with a watermark.
If you want to skip the queue to turn photos into paintings, you can pay $1,99 and get your image in less than 15 min. If you want the image in higher resolution and without the watermark, it will cost you $19 or $59 – depending on the size.
You can visit the user’s gallery to see an example of what you can make. Also, you can start by creating for free and then buy only what you like.
8. Topaz DeNoise AI: Remove Image Noise
DeNoise AI is a product from Topaz used to remove noise from images. Like all Topaz programs, it can be used alone or inside Lightroom and Photoshop.
Noise is a big problem in photography. It can happen because you use a high ISO or a long shutter speed – and older cameras are even more sensitive. So, it’s a problem that most photographers and photography lovers have to face. It’s usually more notorious in the background and darker areas.
Most photo editing software has a tool to remove noise from your photos, but it’s not always enough, and it makes the photo lose sharpness.
DeNoise AI uses deep learning to distinguish between the details of the photo and actual noise. This way, it avoids losing sharpness and helps you recover details from noisy photos.
Learn more in our Topaz DeNoise review.
9. Lensa: Phone Image Editing App with AI
Lensa is a photo editing app that uses AI to offer simple solutions for stunning results. For example, you can retouch a portrait with a single tap magic tool. Also, you can fine-tune the editing with sliders for coloring the lips, whitening the teeth, etc.
You can also replace and blur the background, as well as edit the foreground and the background separately. It also has filters and frames to have fun with your images and create digital art.
Lensa is available for iPhone and Android, and it’s free to download with in-app purchases that go from $1.99 to unlimited access at $49.99.
10. Topaz Sharpen AI: Sharpen Images with AI
Another great Topaz solution is Sharpen AI. You probably know how frustrating it is to have a photo that you love and find that it’s blurry once you open it on your computer.
Unfortunately, blurriness can happen because of camera shake, the subject moving, a bad lens or filter, and so on. So, if the origin of the blur is different – the solution should be too.
That’s why Sharpen AI is different from any photo editor that simply offers a sharpening tool. The AI allows the software to recognize motion and whether it was the camera or the subject that was moving.
It also identifies missed focus and lens softness and recovers the detail from your photo. You can check the before and after examples on their page and download the free trial before buying.
You can use it as a stand-alone program or integrate it into Lightroom and Photoshop. See our Sharpen AI review and grab an exclusive coupon code.
11. This Person Does Not Exist: Random Face Generator
If you don’t have specific needs and you simply need a random AI-generated person, try using This Person Does Not Exist: Random Face Generator.
You can’t tweak the results nor ask for specifics, simply load the page and get a random face. If you don’t like it, just refresh it and get a different result.
It doesn’t give you much control, but it also doesn’t ask you for anything. This face generator is entirely free, and you can download as many images as you like and use them for any purpose.
If you have the knowledge for it, you can access the algorithm and gain control because it’s all open source. You’ll find the link to the code and dataset in the Algorithm tab from the menu.
12. Deep Nostalgia: AI-Powered Photo Animation
The tech in Deep Nostalgia is licensed by MyHeritage which allows you to animate any photo that you upload and generates high-quality videos.
Although it works with any photo (color or black and white), it’s targeted at restoring old family pictures – these are often small or damaged. Because of this, the same feature combines Deep Nostalgia with MyHeritage Photo Enhancer to get a better quality image to work with.
At this time, you can only animate one face at a time – so, in a group photo, you have to select which one you want. You can, of course, make separate animations for each person in the portrait.
The program will choose a gesture sequence based on the position of the face. However, if you want to change it, this is possible. Simply open the drop-down menu, and you can choose from any of the displayed choices.
You can animate your images within 10 to 20 seconds. Then, you’ll be able to share your video. If you don’t have a subscription, you’ll have a watermark on your videos and a limited amount of images. If you get a subscription, you get unlimited access, and you won’t have watermarks.
13. ImagenAI: AI-Powered Photo Editing
ImagenAI uses machine learning to help you batch-edit your photos in record time. This makes it an incredibly useful piece of software for anyone shooting high volumes of photos – wedding and event photographers in particular.
Letting AI loose on editing requires a leap of faith, but ImagenAI learns from your own images – 5,000 of them to be exact, which you upload to its dashboard so it can understand your editing preferences.
With these, it creates a profile, which will update and evolve with every new image you feed it, either via images you upload to be edited, or ones you’ve edited yourself and upload to the platform.
The more you use ImagenAI, the more it can learn how you like your images to look. Check out our ImagenAI review to see it in action.
AI Photo Technology FAQ
What is AI image recognition?
AI recognition allows the software to analyze a photo and identify objects in it. Not only does it recognize whether it’s a portrait or a landscape, but it can also even recognize the people on it and much more. The capabilities and accuracy depend on each software.
How do AI-generated photos work?
AI-generated photos are images created from scratch. It uses Generative Adversarial Network – which was invented in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow and is divided into two neural networks. One of them generates the image, and the other uses all the data collected from millions of photography to score how real it is. Once the score goes back, the first part can improve it and send it to score again as many times as necessary to generate an original AI photo.
What is AI photo enhancement?
AI photo enhancement tools use AI technology to retouch your images simply by uploading or providing one-click tools. Most photo edit programs and apps are incorporating AI photo enhancement tools.
How do I know if an image is AI?
As the tech improves, the AI-generated photos become more difficult to recognize – so these tips might become obsolete at some point. For now, the backgrounds usually look wonky – and if there’s any text in it, it will be indecipherable. In portraits, the eyes might be heterochromatic or cross-eyed, and the teeth look uneven and weird. Hair is also a give-way most of the time because it creates random clumps or long hair looks unnaturally straight.
Final Words
As the AI tech improves, the tools available for photographers are becoming more powerful, and the choices increase as well.
Hopefully, in this article, you found something that makes your workflow faster and easier. AI is a fascinating topic and often controversial – so let us know your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!
Further Reading
