How I use Imagen AI to edit with the Story Keeper Presets and speed up my editing workflow.

I’m all about embracing new technologies, and whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay. Instead of resisting the direction and impact that AI is having in the photography space, I’ve been exploring how I can incorporate it into my business to assist my work and buy back some time. I have been using Imagen AI for my base edits over the past eight months and have gotten it to a point where I find it incredibly helpful in my overall editing workflow. I wanted to show you how I use it in conjunction with the Story Keeper Presets to dramatically cut down my editing time.

If you haven’t come across Imagen, in a nutshell, it is a program that learns your personal editing style and edits your photos individually according to what adjustments are needed in each image. It takes around 0.5 seconds per image, so it’s very fast, and it also offers additional tools such as cropping, straightening, subject masking, and skin smoothing. Once a gallery is complete and you have made the tweaks you want, you can then upload the final edits to Imagen so that it continues to learn your personal style. The more you use it, the more accurate it becomes.

This is a break down of how I’ve been using Imagen ~

Steps from start to finish using Imagen AI and the Story Keeper Presets

Download the Imagen AI software to your desktop. My link will give you 1500 free image credits so you can test it out.
Create an editing profile (see image below) - Open the Imagen app on your desktop and click on AI Profiles. Create a ‘Lite’ profile using one preset (This is the method I use). Or create a Personal AI Profile using 3000+ images. (Choose this option if you have a gallery of 3000+ images using that same preset. If you use various presets, I find that this option does not produce very accurate results).
Cull RAW images and import them into a Lightroom Classic catalog. Flag all final images that I want to deliver to the client and edit in Imagen.
Open Imagen and choose ‘Create a Project’. Choose ‘Edit’, ‘Category’, and then link the Lightroom Catalog where my images are and click upload.
In Imagen I then name my project, select the images I would like edited using the Flag box and tick any other relevant tweaks I want msde (cropping, straightening etc).
Run the gallery through the Imagen editing program. This takes around 3-5 minutes for a gallery of 100 images.
Download the complete gallery in Imagen when it’s done and open in directly in Lightroom Classic.
Make any additional editing tweaks that I need to - exposure, colour tweaks, spot removal, cropping, black and white conversions etc.
Export complete gallery and upload to my gallery delivery program, Pic Time.
Open Imagen again and click on the ‘Upload final edits’ box under the clients gallery. I do this at the end of every session so that Imagen learns my style and the tweaks I make to each gallery. Over time this helps Imagen to edit in my style more accurately as it learns the changes I regularly make.

Things I enjoy & don’t currently use when editing with Imagen AI

I find that using a single preset in Imagen on one gallery works really well. If you edit with multiple presets per gallery, it can get a little tricky. I did not have much success with uploading 3,000-5,000 images and getting Imagen to learn my style this way, as I use a variety of presets on different galleries. Imagen recently released an update where you can edit a gallery with a single preset and you’re not required to upload a profile of 3,000+ images. This is when I found it worked really well for my workflow! If you’re a photographer that solely uses one preset and you have 3,000+ images to upload, I would definitely give this method a go. If you like to change up your preset or find yourself using different presets for different locations, use the single preset method instead.
I use the pay per gallery method and end up paying around $8-$9 USD for a gallery of 100 images. I have outsourced base editing in the past and paid far more than this per gallery so I feel that it’s great value for my workflow and the time I’m saving. There are a variety of annual plans that work out a bit cheaper if you are running a large number of gallery through it.
I can generally complete a full gallery, that has minimal spot removal needed, within an hour after I download it from Imagen (See my vid below). If a session, such as a newborn shoot, requires a lot more skin retouching and spot removal, this will of course take me longer than an hour.
I do use the straightening tool, and I find it pretty accurate.
I don’t use the cropping feature as I prefer to do this myself; I feel like cropping is very much a stylistic choice, and I try to get my crop pretty spot on in-camera.
I don’t use the skin retouching/smoothing as I prefer to have more control over this and which images I apply it to. I use the Story Keeper Lumi AI Tools, which have a great range of AI masks, specifically various skin retouching masks that I can easily apply to the images I want when I am editing the final gallery in Lightroom Classic.