AI photo editing is software in which an AI model sorts through a photographer's thousands of photos, picks the best ones and edits them in the photographer's own style. Choosing the keepers from a large shoot is called culling. Editing means adjusting the colour, brightness and crop of each photo.
Why is it needed? A professional photographer at a wedding or a sports event may take several thousand photos in a day. Many are almost the same, because the camera takes several photos a second. Some are blurred, and in some, a person has closed their eyes. Choosing the best ones by hand can take a full day. Editing them by hand can take several days more.
The software does both jobs in two stages. First, the culling. A computer vision model, a model trained to recognise what is in an image, checks every photo. It looks for blur, closed eyes and faces that are cut off. It then groups photos that are nearly the same, and keeps the best of each group.
Second, the editing. The photographer first teaches the model her style. She gives it photos she edited earlier, with her own changes to colour and brightness. The model learns how she changes a photo, depending on the light and the scene. It then edits the new photos in the same way.
Here is a typical case. A wedding photographer in Udaipur covers a three-day wedding and takes 6,000 photos. Earlier, she had given the model 2,500 photos that she edited herself. Now she loads the 6,000 new photos. The model removes the blurred ones and those with closed eyes, and groups the near-duplicates. It keeps 900 photos. Then it edits all 900 in her style: warm colours for the evening sangeet, softer light for the morning rituals. She goes through the 900, changes a few edits and swaps in a few photos the model left out. This takes her about two hours, not two days.
The photographer still decides. The model only proposes a selection and a first edit. This way of working, where software drafts and a person approves, is called human in the loop.
This model works on images. It is different from a large language model, which reads and writes text. It is also different from the generative tools in graphic design software, which create new parts of an image. Photo editing keeps the photo as it was taken, and only adjusts it. Brands that need many new versions of one design use generative AI for marketing content instead.