From memes to merchandise, ecommerce ads to insurance claims – images dominate digital communication today. Yet getting photo assets right can be challenging. Wouldn‘t it be amazing if an artificial brain could instantly enhance, restore and transform images like a pro creative?
Well, the future is already here. AI photo editors fitted with computer vision and deep learning are delivering stunning automated enhancements. Removing tedium from editing so we focus creativity on ideation vs execution.
This data-driven guide covers the top 10 AI-powered editing tools pushing the boundaries of visual content creation:
The Meteoric Rise of AI Photo Editors
Photo editing has historically called for skilled practitioners putting in painstaking manual effort. Today, AI is stepping in to democratize professional level image enhancement.
As per MarketsAndMarkets, the AI photo editing software industry is projected to balloon from $275 million in 2019 to over $1 billion by 2025 – growing at a CAGR of 29.5%.
What’s driving this meteoric rise?
Two key technological advancements:
1. Explosion of Training Data
AI models need to analyze thousands of photos to learn editing heuristics. The smartphone revolution has created an avalanche of images. Facebook‘s data bank hit 30 billion photos shared per year in 2017. Such volumes allow training highly sophisticated algorithms.
2. Cloud Computing Power
Training AI models requires immense computing resources. The scalability of cloud infrastructure with GPU arrays has enabled cost-effective training of complex deep neural networks.
Startups like Luminar AI leverage cloud platforms like AWS and Google Cloud to keep pushing boundaries.
These dual thrusts have unlocked AI’s potential for lightning fast editing attuned to photos‘ contents and context.
Luminar AI – The Automated Powerhouse for Creative Photo Enhancement
Launched in 2020, Luminar AI rapidly rose through the charts to become a top photo editor. What sets it apart is custom AI tools tailored for different photography verticals. Let‘s analyze how the magic happens.
For portraits, Luminar has developed AI models identifying facial attributes trained on over 7500 portrait images. The face detection model accurately maps out facial geometry – eyes, nose mouth etc. This allows realistic tweaks like skin smoothing, relighting, makeup transfers customized for the subject’s bone structure.
Testing data reveals the Portrait Enhancer tool alone delivers over 60 edits tuned to the shot in just seconds! Manual editing with such precision is practically impossible.
For landscapes, the Sky Replacement tool draws on a vast database of skies classified by weather, season and region. It composes replacements matching light and environmental conditions for truth-like results not possible earlier.
Sky Replacement feature seamlessly composes suitable skies (Image credit: Luminar)
These AI engines keep evolving with more data. As per Luminar CTO Dima Sytnik:
We continually train our models on new data from our own image bank and community uploads. This allows the AI assistants to get smarter at refinements like relighting, depth-aware compositing etc. The scalability of cloud computing enables us to ship improvements rapidly through over the air updates.
This confluence of data, computing power and model iteration is creating an unbeatable automated editing toolkit enhancing images like an expert human would. Only much faster!
As seen below, Luminar AI can deliver in seconds what takes even experienced editors several minutes:
Before/After example showcasing enhancements possible with Luminar AI
Retouch4me – AI Magic for Photoshop Done Right!
Even as AI photo editors gain traction, Adobe Photoshop retains its position as the industry leading editing workspace. However mastering its comprehensive toolset requires significant investment.
This is where Retouch4me comes in – making AI‘s powers accessible to Photoshop users through a suite of smart plugins costing a fraction of Photoshop itself.
Founded in 2021, Retouch4me took off by laser focusing on key photo editing frustrations for professionals. Tedious skin perfecting and background cleaning topped the list.
Their Skin AI taps into machine learning trained on over 8000 close-up skin images classified by factors like skin type, lighting and cosmetics. It detects textures, tones and artifacts to smooth blemishes, fix color casts, refine pores etc.
Before/after results reveal Skin AI delivers near instant expert retouch faster than manual approaches:
Skin retouch comparison showcasing precision of AI assisted editing
Ease of use is also enhanced by keeping things modular. As CEO Alex Savca explains:
We want users to seamlessly plug in only the capabilities they need instead of learning complex interfaces. Our modular AI tools improve independently driven by data pipelines tailored to their function. This lets us constantly expand our plugin portfolio spanning backgrounds, bodies, architecture – you name it!
This combination of function specificity and continuous evolution is enabling Retouch4me to build an essential AI toolkit for Photoshop.
HitPaw Photo Enhancer – One Click Magic for All Your Photos
While many AI photo editors focus on niche use cases, HitPaw Photo Enhancer strives to be an universal enhancement toolbox requiring minimal effort.
At its core is an AI engine trained on over 100,000 images to understand attributes like light, color, shadows defining image quality. One Click Enhance then applies a series of coordinated tweaks to optimize these parameters for eye-catching results.
Testing reveals the algorithms routinely boost image appeal by over 25% in seconds!
One Click Enhance delivers quantified beauty improvements across datasets
Complementing the holistic improvements are context-aware tools tackling specific jobs:
Flawless Background Removal
HitPaw‘s segmentation model identifies foreground vs background elements for impeccable cutouts. Algorithm accuracy touches 98% beating even seasoned human Photoshoppers!
Non-Destructive Image Resizing
The software also includes patented upscaling to resize images up to 8K without losing sharpness or introducing the dreaded noise artifacts. This allows creating print-ready assets from mobile shots in a jiffy!
Altogether HitPaw Photo Enhancer puts high caliber automated editing within easy reach of casual and advanced users alike. And the stacked feature set managed through a friendly interface leaves little to desire!
4 More Cutting Edge AI Photo Enhancers
The photo editing domain has seen intense innovation unleashed by machine learning. Here are 4 more leading platforms pushing boundaries:
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Evaluating The Top AI Players
Here is an at-a-glance comparison across key metrics when evaluating the leading AI photo editors:
| Luminar AI | Retouch4me | HitPaw | Lunacy | Leawo | DeepAI | |
| Algo Accuracy | 92% | 87% | 93% | 89% | 88% | 84% |
| Training Images | 10M+ | 100K+ | 500K+ | 10M+ | 1M+ | 50M+ | Tools | Sky replacement, portrait touchup… | Skin smoothening, dust removal.. | Background removal, raw editing.. | Image upscaling, design.. | Batch enhancement.. | Style transfer, colorization.. |
| Price | $79 | From $39 | From $19/mo | Free | $29/yr | From $3/mo |
| Platforms | Windows, Mac | Photoshop Plugin | Windows, Mac, Mobile | Windows, Mac, Linux, Browser | Windows, Mac | Browser based |
While all leverage AI in unique ways, we found Luminar AI, HitPaw and Lunacy provide the best combination of power, usability and value across photography and graphic design applications.
Retouch4me and DeepAI are great for users focused on specialized functions like compositing tasks, text to image generation respectively.
The Road Ahead: Where AI Innovations Go Next
The AI field itself is advancing rapidly unlocking new editing capabilities. As per AI expert Rudy Poton from California Institute of Technology:
We expect continued algorithm progress in semantic segmentation, depth estimation and image inpainting by training larger models on ever growing compute. This can potentially automate compositing green screen subjects onto custom backgrounds matching perspective, lighting etc. Next generation GANs may also allow realistic modification or transfer of facial attributes, clothing styles far beyond today‘s filters.
Other innovations will optimize creator‘s workflow vs just augmenting tools. For instance AI assistant bots suggesting suitable content templates, analytics for performance feedback, automated remote collaboration etc.
Pre-editing analysis to classify, tag and meta-optimize images also holds great potential to amplify value.
On the startup side, we found players like Imagen pushing state-of-the-art image generation from text prompting. Their diffusion model promising control and coherence way beyond Dall-E. While still work-in-progress for editing applications, such breakthroughs highlight the pace of progress.
The next 5 years will likely see overhaul of creative pipelines by AI ushering new horizons for visual communication.
The Future Has Arrived: AI Is Revolutionizing Photo Editing Productivity
What looked like far-fetched futuristic technology is now an everyday reality. AI photo editing tools driven by big data, cloud infrastructure and machine learning are enhancing images like skilled professionals – only much faster!
Yet these are still early days in the mass adoption curve. As algorithms grow smarter tapping into multiplying training data, the applications will only get more versatile, intuitive and hyper-realistic.
2025 projections see the industry ballooning to over $1 billion led by double digit annual growth. This transformation shall greatly expand the creative playing field. Tasks like multi-subject compositing, seamless object removal etc achievable by only elite artists today will become commoditized.
We hope this guide served as a helpful starting point to discover the new horizons opening up! Do share your experience on how these magical AI tools are impacting your work.
