Custom Editing vs Hybrid AI Editing

Here at Post Partner, we pride ourselves on having strong relationship-driven editing services, being your team behind the scenes. That means our success is dependent on strong communication and feedback to ensure consistent editing and happy photographers. That also means communicating what our services are and what the differences are! In this post, we hope to bring clarity to our two most popular editing services, Custom Editing, and Hybrid AI editing. 

We hope that after reading this post you will have a better understanding of our services and can make an educated decision about what service would best suit the needs of your photography business.

To start here is a quick comparison chart of the editing services associated with each.

Custom Editing

$0.39/image - 7-10 business day turnaround

Our custom editing is a full-service option that starts with a free trial where you explain your editing style and work through images together with our production manager. Once you feel confident that we understand your editing needs we will assign an editor from our team to work with you and our production manager for an entire editing season. 

Using feedback from the editing that we send back to you we build a relationship to better understand your editing needs and make changes when needed. We understand that preferences change over time and we are here to grow/change with you. Your editor is available to answer any questions, and our production manager can hop on a call at any point. 

The custom editing service is exactly that; custom editing for each gallery you send in. 

Editing includes:

• Applying Presets 

• White Balance

• Exposure

• Contrast

• Tone Curve

• Color Mixer

• Cropping and Straightening

We will reference any tone setters that you include in the gallery and sync editing information before making final adjustments to ensure consistency. Every image is touched by our editors and given the time it deserves. 

Starting this season we are also including a list of adjustment filters that include: 

• AI Masking (subject, sky, background)

• Linear Gradient

• Radial Gradient

If this is what you are looking for you can begin a trial today!

Hybrid AI

$0.21/image - 5-7 Business day turnaround

Hybrid AI is our newest editing service that pairs you with our editing team that leverages AI software to edit your images, followed by a hands-on consistency check. This process hinges on having a strong AI profile that can produce high-quality edits that are then processed by our editing team. This service is geared towards high-volume photographers which is why we have a 350 image or $75 minimum on all hybrid orders.

You can apply your own AI profile to the images before sending them to us or we can build you an in-house AI profile for a one-time fee of $100, using a minimum of 2500 edited images. Once this profile is completed we test it by applying it to 50-100 images and getting your feedback. 

You might be thinking, what is the difference between an AI profile and a regular preset? A preset is a saved value of information that does not change. If the contrast of the preset is set to +20, the preset will always apply +20 contrast. A profile on the other hand will sample the 2500 images that you used to create the profile and determine if the contrast changes depending on various factors, such as image brightness, histogram values, and camera settings. If you drop the contrast from +20 to 0 on bright sunny days, the AI profile will apply that change (in an ideal world). 

The reason we offer hybrid AI editing is that we found that while AI editing is a great tool, it does not always result in consistent edits. That is why our editing team analyzes the AI edits and makes adjustments to give back a higher-quality edited gallery with more consistency.

The process for a Hybrid AI gallery is as follows: 

• Apply AI profile to images 

• Import edits into Lightroom

• Review edits and make adjustments for consistency

The editing that our team does for consistency: 

• Exposure

• White Balance

• Cropping + Straightening

 Due to the nature of AI editing, we do not reference tone setters if included in the gallery. We may reference them for white balance and exposure, but we do not sync off of them like we do in custom editing. 

Conclusion

We hope that this helps you decide which service fits you and the needs of your photography business! As always, if you have any questions reach out to us at hello@postartner.com.