Aftershoot is your AI-powered digital assistant in culling & editing, a tool like no other. So it's absolutely normal for you to have some more technical questions regarding how it works. In this article, we will answer the ones that you asked us most often.

There are two sides to Aftershoot's AI - Culling & Editing.

But the general principle is the same. The most simple explanation is that the AI is a computer that was taught by being shown repeatedly made decisions. Our AI will learn your preferences by making patterns based on your decisions when culling or editing. So if you prefer images with more emotions over images with perfect focus, the AI will try to prioritize that when you show it new images.

Aftershoot's Culling AI

In essence, our AI-powered algorithms analyze your images and perform the first cull. The AI has been trained to identify objective issues - closed eyes and blurry images, as well as subjective ones - lighting, background clearness, composition, etc.

To begin, the AI analyzes the images you uploaded and assigns each image a score from 1 to 100 - the higher the score the better.

Then, it groups similar images into separate groups and selects the best image for you, out of each group. The best images are marked as Selected. It will also separate images with Closed Eyes, Blurry Images, as well as Highlights.

Find out more about these groups and culling with Aftershoot in general in this Getting Started guide that we put together for you.

When it comes to how many images are selected for each group, it depends on the Culling Preferences that you chose before starting. You can read more about them in this article.

Moreover, the AI will continuously learn from you, so it can better understand your particular needs. Every time you review and change its selections, it will remember that and adjust for it in the future.

Aftershoot's Editing AI

There are two ways you can edit with Aftershoot's AI - Personal AI Editing Profiles & pre-built AI Styles.

The principle behind their work is the same, the difference is how they are created. A Personal AI Editing Profile is created based on your style and edited photos and will grow and change depending on what you feed it. A pre-built AI Style is the same, except that it was taught by us in a specific editing style and it doesn't grow or change with you.

The way both edit is the same. The AI analyzes each image it comes across and dynamically adapts its editing to suit this image in particular. It considers the context of the images, lighting conditions, background, and more.

Depending on the editing settings it was taught on, the AI will adjust the following sliders:

Just like with the AI in the case of culling, your Personal AI Editing Profile can learn from you and become better. You can feed it a new edited image or even its own edits that you adjusted yourself. The more you use it the better it will become at mirroring your style.

Find out more about Personal AI Editing Profiles and editing with Aftershoot in general in this Getting Started guide that we put together for you.

The absolute minimum that you can use to create a Personal AI Editing Profile is 2,500 images. However,

for optimal performance, we recommend using at least 5,000 images. You can always start with the minimum and build up your AI Profile further by uploading catalogs you will edit in the future.

Learn more about how to build a better Personal AI Editing Profile in this article.

As we explained above, the AI groups duplicates & similar images together and select the best one out of each group. This way you get at least one image from each group of duplicates.

But even if you're not satisfied with the image selected by the AI, you can look through the Duplicates group and change the selection.

In the case of images that don't have duplicates, but the AI considered them to be a bit flawed (closed eyes, blurriness, etc.) and not good enough to go into Selected - they will be grouped separately in the Warnings group. This way you won't miss out on a single image.

Moreover, Aftershoot is non-destructive - it will never delete images unless you do it yourself, even the ones it rejects.

As mentioned, Aftershoot performs non-destructive culling - your file originals are always in the same location where you imported from.

When culling the AI adds sidecar files - XMPs, to add Star and Color ratings to your images. These XMP files will be later read by your editing software of choice, and display the Star and Color ratings.

You can delete the XMP files to remove Aftershoot's ratings if you wish to do so.

Note: In the case of JPEGs the Star & Color information is added directly into the JPEG metadata of the original image, not the sidecar XMP file.

Aftershoot is supported by all Windows- and MacOS-operated desktops and laptops. It works locally on your device, occupies minimal space, and you decide how much processing power it can use.

We recommend that your device, regardless of the operating system, has at least 8GB RAM and 4 CPUs.

All file formats by all leading camera manufacturers, including but not limited to Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sony, Olympus, Panasonic, and such.

Support for Sony A1 will be coming soon!

Aftershoot supports all leading RAW formats along with JPEGs and PNGs. HEIC support will be coming soon!