AI Vs Humans: Who’s Better at Photo Editing?

The idea of replacing routine jobs with technology, especially with AI, has always been met with a lot of suspicions. Can technology actually provide the same quality as that of manual work, and which has already been mastered by many for years? Will AI eventually cause us to lose our jobs?

These concerns are also very relevant in the field of photo editing. Nowadays, there are many software and applications popping up that adopts Artificial Intelligence into their technology for the purpose of performing photo editing tasks as how humans do it. Removal.AI’s automatic background remover for example, also has the same goals.

Photo editing tasks are almost routine and are something that can be possibly taught to a software program. With the integration of Artificial Intelligence technology, it aims to become a more innovative solution that provides faster, more efficient photo editing services.

But what proof do these applications hold, that allows them to claim they can compete with manual photo editors? They may be faster, but can they actually compete in terms of quality?

Who is better when it comes to photo editing, Humans or AI?

What are the Advantages of Hiring Professional Photo Editors?

Humans use tools that allow them to manipulate images and edit them as they want. One great example is Adobe Photoshop. For many years, this software has been the partner of many photographers and photo editors since its features provide everything that is needed to edit photos.

When hiring professional photo editors, the workflow is easy. You send the image, place your requests, and the editors will do them for you. The editors then will use photo editing software to carefully select the edges of an image’s subject so it’s easy to remove the background if wanted. The editors can also do some adjustments in exposure, color, saturation, and other tasks that entail a photo editing service.

The usual turnaround time for a professional photo editing service request is within 24 hours and can cost from $0.30-$0.70 per photo.

Easy, right? So what can professional photo editors do for you that AI can’t? Here are few examples:

They can listen to your custom requests

Software applications have specific tasks they are programmed to perform. In short, you can only expect to receive exactly what they are taught to do. But with professional photo editors, you can request and guide them on what output you want to receive based on your preferences.

They can copy and maintain your photo editing output preferences

Whether you are a designer, eCommerce business owner, or a photographer, your identity in the field you are working in is reflected by the consistency of your work. This is the reason why many employ the same photo editor/s again and again so that they can expect to receive the same quality of work.

But even if you need to change your usual photo editor unexpectedly, there will almost be no problem with hiring a different one. Professional photo editors understand better and can analyze which adjustments were applied in your photos. They can copy these adjustments and achieve the results that you want.

They can accept requests for quick fixes.

Not satisfied with the initial editing or you’ve found a flaw in the first edit? You can request your photo editors to redo or fix it for you. With human editors, it’s okay to negotiate and help point out the flaws that they need to fix.

Because of these reasons, many photographers, designers, and businesses still prefer outsourcing professional image editing services. So now, what edge does an automated photo editing app have given these already familiar and convenient conditions?

To ease you and answer that question, let’s discuss first what can an AI-powered photo editing app do.

What can AI-Powered Photo Editor Do?

Artificial Intelligence technology aims to imitate the functions of a human being. Computer vision, the branch of AI that deals with learning how a human eye functions, is used in order to teach a photo editing application how to ‘see.’ In applications such as our Removal.AI background remover, the AI-part can do the following functions:

It can identify the image subject from the background. Removal.AI’s photo editing application specializes in background removal. It has the ability to detect the subject of an image, and the rest of the application is programmed to remove the background from it and make the edit finer with softened edges.

It learns and improves the more you feed it with images to process. Machine learning is a subset of AI that allows an application to learn from its past processes/cases. The more data or images you feed the tool to process, the more it improves its object detection. This enables the software to make better judgments and achieve better results over time.

Now, let’s have a look at the claims that an AI-powered photo editor can do better than human editors:

What are the Advantages of an Automated Photo Editor?

AI-powered photo editors process faster than humans

We’ve mentioned it before, the turnaround time for an outsourced photo editing service is within 24 hours. But in an AI-powered photo editor: seconds!

Obviously, computers, when taught correctly can do a task a hundred times faster than a human being. Just imagine if you have hundreds to thousands of images. With an AI photo editor, you can have your photos back to you already processed, almost immediately.

You can’t give it custom instructions, but another solution is always ready for you.

This is one of the advantageous features of software applications. They are developed to cater to almost all of your needs as you would require a human to do the tasks. Most of the time photo editing applications have extra functions and features that allow you to tweak your images further. These are provided so you can achieve perfection for your photos.

Let’s take Removal.AI for example, its main function is to remove the background from a photo. But other than that, it also has its own editor so you can make adjustments easily like color corrections, exposure, saturation adjustments, etc. This is still a fast solution compared to hiring or outsourcing a photo editor.

You can save more money than hiring a photo editor

As mentioned, outsourcing a photo editing service for a single photo can cost from $0.3 to $0.7. It might seem cheap until you see and find that using an automated photo editing tool will only cost you $0.07 per image. That’s about 4x lesser in terms of basic cost so you can definitely save more money.

What’s more, is that some of these automated service providers would even allow you to use their photo editing tool for free as many times as you want. That’s just a lot more generous than outsourcing this service from others.

AI-powered tools can be integrated into your workflow

You can take more control of your images and your schedule by integrating AI-powered applications into your workflow. API’s or Application Programming Interfaces acts as intermediaries or a mediator between applications which allows them to communicate with each other. In other words, you can access the power of AI tools into your own system with just a few codes that are needed for integration. With this, you can definitely save your time and effort.

Takeaway…

Needless to say, using AI-powered photo editing tools and outsourcing photo editors have their own advantages. Manual photo editing has been going on for many years and there are already a lot of experts and professionals that are capable of providing high-quality results. On the other hand, AI technology in photo editing is still in the process of learning. Although they can provide good enough results, many are still not convinced enough to fully transition to an automated service.

Still, it depends on your needs whether to use photo editing tools or outsource editors. It is good enough that we, in general, are provided with many solutions to choose from so we can improve the quality of our lives and careers. So it is best that we stay mindful of new trends and be open to new solutions that aim to address the challenges we encounter daily.