The King of AI Culling Adobe Lightroom vs Aftershoot

A month ago, Adobe finally announced the much-anticipated AI-assisted culling within Lightroom Classic and Express. This new feature is aimed at photographers who need to narrow down thousands of images into a much more concise set of images that they will eventually deliver to their clients. Now, when I first heard about this at Adobe MAX, my first thought was, oh boy, any company that specializes in AI culling like Aftershoot, they're gonna be in a lot of trouble. And how could they not be? So today's the day where I'm gonna look at Lightroom and Aftershoot side-by-side and see who is eating whose lunch when it comes to AI-assisted or automated culling. Hey guys, Patrick from the future here. I just got done editing this video and I realized, oh my gosh, it is really, really long. It's so long that it might actually discourage you from watching this, but I wanted to include everything. I wanted it to be fair and honest. I wanted to show you how everything worked out for me as I went through this review. And so what I've decided to do is I put different timestamps down below. If you don't wanna watch me work through both programs and you just wanna see the final conclusion, no shame in that, just jump ahead, watch the final part of this video, but I hope you guys enjoy. All right, so I need to be very upfront with this review or this shootout because this is actually being sponsored by Aftershoot. They specifically reached out to me and asked for a head-to-head video comparison. And I guess that's what you do if the Adobe juggernaut is coming after your business. But yeah, this video is sponsored by Aftershoot. But that being said, I also do own a lot of stock in Adobe and I've always made the joke to my friends that if you just buy their stock, basically the subscription to Lightroom and Photoshop is going to be paid for. Although Adobe stock hasn't been doing that great since the AI revolution. But yeah, I just wanna be upfront and tell you that I do have a financial connection to Adobe as well. So I'm gonna try to be as unbiased as possible in this video. I do value my reputation and I only will give my opinion here at the end of this video. This video is being released around the holiday season and Aftershoot is gonna have some really special deals going on. You can find all of those in the link in the description below. But if you're seeing this video months later, don't worry. I'm gonna make an evergreen link in the description below that features the absolute best deal for Aftershoot so that you can take advantage of this software as well. And Adobe, well, they don't really give discounts at all, but you can check out their software as well in the description below. So let's first start with Aftershoot. I think because most photographers that are using any sort of AI culling are probably using software like Aftershoot. They've been around a little bit longer so they've refined how all of this works. And I think at this point, they really are the industry standard when it comes to AI culling. So unlike Lightroom, that's kind of a jack of all trades, Aftershoot really does three things. You can do AI retouching, which is brand new, you can do AI editing, or you can do AI culling. That's it, those are the three things that you can do in their software. So let's first hit create a new album. And normally you could import your images through a Lightroom catalog or Capture One catalog, but with AI culling, you have to drag a folder with the actual images in it. Now, the images that I'm gonna use for this demo, they're JPEGs from this crazy family photo shoot that I did at sunrise, and the colors in this are just absolutely spectacular. And so I thought this would be a fun shoot to show. I'm going to time all of the importing, all of the culling, all of the processing, all the export times on both programs, and take note of all of the snappiness as I shuttle through all of the images, because I think that's a really important aspect in culling as well. Let's go ahead and drag this folder over and start the timer. Okay, so that was really quick. I think it was less than 10 seconds, but I'm gonna say 12 seconds to import all 260 images into Aftershoot. So that's the import process. Next, we need to get to the heart of the matter, and that is going to be culling. So up here, I'm not gonna be going to edit or retouch, but instead I'm gonna go to cull. And here we have two choices. We can do AI automated culling, which is the one that does everything for you, which I'm going to be using in this video. But we also have the AI assisted culling, where you're able to go through and kind of cull a little bit more on your own without the software doing everything for you. I think both are useful and have their purposes, but let's go ahead and use the full-blown AI automated culling just so we can see the full capabilities of the software. Now, the first thing we need to do is choose the genre of photography. This is family portraits. The first slider allows us to select the number of photos that we want. So if we want a lot of photos and maybe we're only going to remove 10%, we could go to the far right. And if we wanted to narrow down our 260 images just to say like 20, we could go to the far left to the extreme setting. I'm gonna set this on standard. We could hit start culling, but let's go ahead and do custom AI cull. And this is going to allow us to turn a few other settings on. The first one is highlight photos. This is gonna be really useful, say if you're a wedding photographer and you wanna do a sneak peek within a few days of the wedding, or maybe you wanna highlight images that will make the slideshow or the album, you could turn that on. I really don't see any reason not to highlight the best photos from the series. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. So let's talk about duplicate photos a little bit because this is really the bread and butter both with Aftershoot and Lightroom. Essentially, what we're trying to do is take a full photo shoot, whether that be an hour or whether that be multiple days, and narrow down all of the pictures into little micro sets. Those micro sets could be hundreds of images or those micro sets could just be a single one-off image that looks nothing like the surrounding images. And so what this slider does is it determines how many images are going to be stacked or grouped together. And the number of images in that stack are going to really help you make a decisive decision on which one is the best and get you moving through the sets of images even faster. So on the far left, small groups would be, if I just shoot tight and then wide, it's going to separate all of those images based on something like focal length or it might composition or maybe number of people in the photos. So small is going to give me a lot of groups, but the pictures in that group is going to be really small. And then large groups is going to say, hey, maybe the entire family photo session at the altar is gonna be thrown into one group and it might be a hundred images with a bunch of different people in it. It's going to just lump more photos into that group. I actually find that standard groups is probably the sweet spot where it's taking different compositions and separating those out, but it's breaking up your photo shoot into smaller sections and not lumping them all in one big set. I hope that makes sense, but we'll see more as I go through this. Right below that, we have the option of labeling everything a two-star. If it's blurry, we can also customize that on how blurry. Maybe you shoot film or you like shooting with a shallow depth of field. Maybe blurriness and being out of focus is an artistic choice. You might want to be really lenient on that. Or if you're shooting at say F8 and you're doing headshots and you want the eyes to be entirely in focus and that's the most important thing, maybe we go over to strict because we want to nail the focus on every picture. Again, I'm going to go moderate because a family photo, I don't think that they're super picky if like one person is just outside of the depth of field. I think that's going to be acceptable, but you can choose the level and you can also turn that on and off. And then just below that, we can choose whether or not somebody's eyes are closed or not and give that a one star. And so with a family portrait session, obviously people having their eyes open is pretty important. So we're going to leave that on. So I'm ready to hit start culling. I'm going to hit start on the timer, start culling, and let's see how long this actually takes. So we have a status bar up here that's going to go through all of these images. One thing that I do want to mention as it's going through this is I can come over here to home and I could create a new album and I can start importing images again. Let me just go ahead and do that. And as it's importing another set of images, I go back to home and you can see the culling is still going on in another set of images. So maybe this is going to be a little unfair to Aftershoot because I'm running these two tests simultaneously. But one thing you can't do in Lightroom that we'll see here soon is you can't import and cull multiple things at the same time. You're really stuck working in one catalog, but I'm kind of getting ahead of myself here. Three seconds, one second. It warns me that it is complete. And by the time I could actually stop the timer, we were right about two minutes to cull all of those images. So here's the final export of the culling process. It took 260 images and it narrowed it down to 108. So it got rid of more than 50% of the images. And then over here on the right, we can see exactly what it did. It accepted 108 images. 93 of those are solid images that it says are ready to be delivered to our client. And 15 of those images are highlights that I could use as a sneak peek or an album, or I could just have them marked for my own good. Maybe these are images that would make my portfolio. These are the cream of the crop images from this entire photo shoot. Now, right below that, we could turn on the not accepted images, and that's going to show all 260 images. And the way that Aftershoot organizes all of these is by stars, but also by colors. And we can see here the very first image it rejected, it gave it a two star and marked it red, which is blurred eyes. We can see over here on the right hand side, the key faces. And because I set my blur acceptability fairly moderate, it actually found that this image was the least sharp of all of the ones in this set. So it deleted that. Image number two here, it gave it a green rating, which is a select. And basically it said out of the seven images from this little micro set, this was the best one. And then from there, the next five images almost look identical from this view. I can't really tell much of a difference, but they marked them as duplicates or three stars, and they're going to exclude those from the images that I delivered. Now, if you're like me, you might want to deliver more images to a family than less, just to kind of give yourself a little bit of a leeway there in case somebody doesn't like the way that they smiled. If I want to include one of these, I can just simply hit the A button, and it's going to change that from a yellow to a green. The A means accept. And now that we've included this extra image, you can see our accepted has jumped up one number to 109. Just to show you guys what closed eyes looks like, I have deselected everything so that we can only see the images that it said had eyes closed. So in this particular image, it said that there was too many eyes looking away or closed for this to be a keeper, and so it marked it a one star. So this is how the software makes selections and how it rates everything. And this is all determined based on the criteria that we set before we hit the call button. Let me look at some of the different ways that you can view the images, because that is really what makes this software so powerful. It's not just the assigning of all of these attributes to these images, but it's also how quickly you can look at the images, make fast decisions, and shuffle through the entire photo shoot. So this is grid view. If I come up here to the top left, we have two other views that we can look at these images. Let's switch to loop view. So this is probably the view that I would use the most, and I think it really shows you how the grouping and the stacks really work, because it gives you two separate timelines here. If you notice here, each one of these stacks has a number of images that represents how many images are grouped into that grouping. Remember the grouping size was dictated earlier when we said how large or how small we wanted the groups to be. And then there might be some examples that don't have any groupings because it was just a one-off shot, like these two images here, the grandparents are walking with the kid. But to really show off loop view, let me pick one where there are seven images. So there's a lot of photos in here. And you can see above our main film strip, we have a second film strip. And these seven images represent the seven images that are grouped here below. Now of these seven images, it decided to keep two of them. It had four as kind of duplicates that weren't significantly different. And then it had one image that it rejected. But I think the selections that it made are great. Two out of the seven are keepers. I think that's a good keep ratio. And if I'm done with these seven, I can now hit the right arrow key, and I can start going through the other groupings of photos. And at this point, essentially I am just checking to make sure that the software is doing a good job. The final view that I wanna look at before we wrap up this section on Aftershoot and look at Lightroom's culling is going to be the survey mode. Survey mode is really good for when you're trying to look at similar images side by side and you wanna see them large. The other thing that's really nice about survey mode is if I hold the space bar and hover my cursor over any one person, it's gonna zoom in even more on all three images at the same rate and the same composition. So maybe this is a little bit easier to determine which one that I like the most. And if I'm still having problems, I can hit space bar again, and it's gonna zoom in even more. And we can see what Aftershoot did here. It chose the image where the little girl is looking at the camera as opposed to the other images where she's looking away. For a shoot like this, maybe I kind of like the middle image equally as well. So I could hit the A to accept that one also. And then if I space bar out again, I can see all three images. I've now got two keepers instead of one. And then if I hit the forward key, it's going to jump to the next set of images where both parents are looking at the child. And I can now choose the select from there. When everything's done, we're gonna go back to the grid view, and I'm gonna go ahead and turn off all of the not accepted images so that we're only seeing the absolute best photos from this photo series. I'm just gonna come down here and hit export 110 photos. We can choose where we wanna save these photos. We can choose which images we're gonna export. So we're gonna be doing all of our selects and our highlights. And then we can also choose how we rename them and everything. I'm gonna go ahead and hit copy 110 photos. Before I do that, let's go ahead and reset our timer. And let's see how long it takes to export. And boom, we are done. That took less than nine seconds to export 110 photos to our new folder. So that's Aftershoot. Let's go ahead and open up Lightroom Classic and import all of these images in and use their assisted culling, which is a new early access feature. This section is probably gonna be a little bit shorter only because as you'll see, Lightroom just doesn't have nearly as many options as what Aftershoot does. But I do wanna show you some of the highlights of this because I do think that this is a huge addition for Lightroom and if you're a Lightroom user, you're definitely gonna wanna play around with this if you shoot large groups of people. So with Lightroom, there are multiple different ways that we can import photos. We can come up here to file and we can just click the import photos and videos. We can open them from another catalog. You can import them from your memory card. There's just a lot of flexibility in how Lightroom allows you to import. But for the sake of this video, I'm going to just drag and drop our folder the same way that I did with Aftershoot. And if I drag and drop my images onto the top of Lightroom, it is going to open up our source and show exactly where that folder is on our computer. It's then going to make thumbnails of all of them and put little check boxes on which ones we actually wanna import in. Depending on how you look at this, this could be good or bad. Like it's one more step that you have to go through. I don't necessarily think I need to confirm that I wanna import all of these in. But maybe there is a situation where you have multiple shoots all showing up in one folder. And maybe you wanna highlight some of them to import to this session, but not others. I don't know. It is one extra little step. But because we're importing all of these images in, there's really nothing else I have to do except hit import and then jump down to my clock. And let's start this. I believe the last one was like 10 or 12 seconds. Here's our time bar up here. Let's hit stop. So in this example, I don't know. I'm gonna call that a tie. I mean, they both imported all of these images in at roughly the same amount of time. Maybe I need to do another test with thousands of raw files to see over a larger dataset if one comes out ahead. But in my mind, it's both 10 to 11 seconds, not much of a difference there. All right, so let's go ahead and select all of these images. And then we can come over here to assisted culling. Now this is under the library module. And if you're not a Lightroom user, library is kind of the overview. It's gonna show you all of the images in the set. Develop would be where you can go through and actually adjust the raw files. I should note that Aftershoot doesn't really have a develop setting. They can do presets and give your images a specific look and edit them that way, but they don't have a traditional raw editor. So just keep that in mind. But let's go back to library. We're gonna come up here to assisted culling. And here we basically have three different options that we can choose. We can choose if the subject is in focus, if the eye is in focus, or if the eyes are open. And then what's neat about Lightroom is they do have a slider that kind of represents how sharp does an image need to be, how lenient you could be with that, or we can pull it all the way down to soft. So I'm gonna keep this, I don't know, around 50. We can do the same thing with eye focus. If I was doing headshots, I'd probably want this to be near 100 just to make sure that the eyes are really, really in focus. I don't know how it would handle if one eye is predominantly towards the camera, if you'd have to lower that. One thing that's really interesting about Lightroom is as I move this slider around determining how sharp I want my eyes, I can see in real time the number of selects and rejects. So right here I have 43 rejected, but if I went all the way up to 100, it's going to reject 181 images. I don't know if that's just too stringent or it says something about my photography. I don't know why it's rejecting that many, but it is kind of cool to see how many images it's going to reject in real time as we move some of these sliders around. So for a family shoot, I don't know, like I feel like these are both a little redundant. Maybe I'm going to choose the eyes in focus and not the subject in focus because I feel like I don't really need both of those layers of AI on top of each other. So I'm going to deselect subject focus and only have eye focus because I think that's the priority here. I could come down and hit reject photos of people without their eyes. That would be any kind of test shot or I took just a blank photo of the beach before anyone entered my frame. I wouldn't want any of those photos to be considered good shots that would be in the dataset. So you could select reject photos without people's eyes. You could also come down here to eyes open and you could say reject all images where you can't tell if the eyes are open. I don't know, for people, maybe keeping this unchecked is still a good idea because there could be some instances where people are looking at each other and you still want to keep those images, even though their eyes might be kind of squinty. And then we have the rejects. We can choose whether or not to reject documents and receipts. Maybe that's for if you're shooting pictures of your tax write-offs during a photo shoot or something. I don't really know what documents and receipts are, but we're definitely gonna reject all those. Misfires, anything where the strobe doesn't fire or the camera is pointing down to the ground because it hit my hip. We can go ahead and delete all those, although I know none of those are in this dataset. And then exposure issues as well. Now, sometimes exposure issues, you can salvage those by using an editor to bring down the exposure or to lift the exposure up. But in this example, I'm going to go ahead and reject all exposure issues. Here we have view where we can see the selects. We can see the rejects and we can see all of the images side by side. We could do this in Aftershoot as well, but maybe one good way to edit is to hit the rejects and just quickly scroll through here and see if there's any random photo, like maybe this one with the grandparents, that you took one image of and it's trying to reject it in both softwares, but you know you need to deliver that image. I can't tell you how many times I've shot a wedding where the bride is like, hey, can you get that one picture right there? And you turn and you get it and it's not a great photo, but you know you have to deliver that because the bride specifically told you to take it. So I could see examples where you might want to look at all the rejects really quickly and just make sure that you're not throwing something out of the batch that the software thinks is a bad image, but you know, deep down, you probably still need to deliver that to your client. I'm going to go ahead and hit all so that we can see all of the images side by side. And now we need to move down to stacking. We're going to go to auto stack. And this is where we're going to be able to narrow these images down by capture time, or we could stack by how visually similar they are. With a family shoot, maybe capture time is a good way to do this because if I'm shooting, you know, a group of people, maybe I'm shooting 30 images in 90 seconds. And then I'm probably going to put my camera down and I'm going to direct the families and say, hey, why don't we get all the parents out of here? Let's get all the kids together. And there's going to be some amount of time that passes where there's no shooting. And then I'm going to get the next shot lined up. And then I'm going to shoot another 30 pictures in 90 seconds. And so you could imagine if we're trying to stack and organize our pictures by time, that might make a lot of sense. But I could also see on the other side of the coin, stacking and organizing by visual similarity, that could be useful too, because during those bursts of shoots, maybe I'm shooting ultra wide and I'm getting more of the scene. And then I quickly zoom in and continue to shoot tighter, maybe three quarter shots where I'm cutting off their feet and their legs, but I'm just getting, you know, waist up. All of those would look very, very different as I zoom in and out, or as I, you know, move around the scene, but they still might be captured in a relatively short amount of time. So this is one where you really have to figure out exactly what fits your photo shoot. Let's go ahead and stack by capture time. So this is kind of cool. If I move up to one, let's do one minute. It's going to tell me I have five stacks. Could that possibly be right? Every one minute, it's going to bundle the pictures together. At one minute interval, there should be like 40 stacks. I don't really exactly know what's going on here. Oh, I can see here, like right behind here, it is stacking 239 images together for some weird reason. As I go to the bottom here, 36, 37, 38, 39, like look at all these images. Like it almost feels like it's not reading the timestamp correctly on any of these photos. Like that's really weird. Let's say a reasonable stack time could be like every five minutes, maybe. Every five minutes I'm changing up the scene, but it's still giving me only five stacks. It's like zero stacks or five stacks? Four stacks. If I go to the duration of the shoot, I mean, this shoot was only an hour, it's giving me two stacks, one with eight images and one with 251 images. So I don't know what is going on with this. I've seen this happen before using other images to make this video, but I feel like stacking by capture time could be a very, very useful feature. In fact, maybe this is something that Aftershoot wants to do eventually too, but I don't think this is usable. So instead let's go to stack by visual similarity and this is analyzing all 259 images. Okay, and this seems to be making more sense. If I come down to less similar, meaning I don't care how similar the images look, throw them in a group, I'm gonna wind up with one stack with all 259 images. That makes sense. Let's go all the way to more similar and that's doing the opposite. We're gonna have zero stacks and we're gonna have 259 individual images. That also makes sense. Let's go somewhere here in the middle. I feel like I chose the middle settings on all of the Aftershoot filters, so that's only fair to do here in Lightroom. And in the middle, we're getting five stacks. And as you can see, once again, one of these stacks has 205 images and then 32 and then two and then eight and then 12. Like what is happening here? If I go like more aggressive, I still wind up with a few of these where the stacks are 60 images, 45 images. So I don't know really what to do here. I just showed you these images and you know that these stacks should look very different. We should never have a stack with 40 pictures or 200 pictures. We have different groups of people, we have different sunsets, we have the dunes, we have the kids. Why in the world is it doing this? I gotta get through this section. Obviously, this isn't looking good for Lightroom, but let me go ahead and hit stack. So unfortunately, there's not an easy way for me to time Lightroom putting these into stacks because one, it actually did this very quickly, very inaccurately, but it did make these stacks really quickly. And it happens kind of live as you're doing it. It's not as clear as Aftershoot where you hit go and then you see a start and stop time and you can say, ah, that took a minute to do. Lightroom doesn't really give me that option. It's kind of always doing it in the background, but it did it so poorly that even if it does it quickly, I just, I don't know. I feel like this is apples to oranges. I don't know how to compare this. I really don't. For the sake of this video, let's just keep moving forward because this is the latest version of Lightroom and I'm just showing you what it's actually doing with the same dataset. So let's go ahead and look at the images now. All right, so we have all of the scoring done and we've put all of the images in stacks and I've zoomed out so that we can kind of see this broad view of all of the images. I don't think any of these stacks or most of these stacks aren't really that useful because as you can see here, we have a stack of 16. And then if I scroll down, here's a stack of 93. I mean, goodness, like that's half the photo shoot. Like that doesn't even make any sense. But I do want to show you what Lightroom is doing to score these because as you can see up here, it's added these little green check marks. So if I hover over the green check mark, it now tells me that this image has correct eye focus and that the eyes are open. And then what's really cool is it does give me a score. So it tells me that 95 out of 100, the eye is in focus. Again, remember we could set that parameter earlier on. And then it now tells me that 54 out of 100, the eyes are open. So, you know, maybe somebody squints naturally and it's going to rate them a little bit lower or somebody's like deer in the headlights and their eyes are open really big, it might rate that higher. But it's not just a yes or no, it kind of gives you a score rating, which I could see being useful, especially if you're doing something like headshots where maybe the eyes matter a little bit more than, you know, a pulled back family portrait like this. Here with the little child, it also rejected this image saying that it appears to be out of focus. If I zoom into this photo, I mean, it is very out of focus. So it did a good job there. And here's another image where it rejected. It said the eyes are open, but they're not in focus. I find these eyes to be perfectly acceptable. So maybe I just need to be a little bit more lenient on how out of focus the eyes can be. With both softwares, I will say, you need to kind of go through and figure out exactly what your preferences are. And maybe you need to even make note of this because obviously you don't want to be rejecting images that the software finds to be not sharp enough, but you find that totally acceptable. All right, so now that we've looked at the actual scoring of all of these images, you'll also notice that there's really no label on any of these photos. So we need to add another step to this, and that's gonna be the organized results right under stacking. So let's go ahead and hit batch actions. And here we have our selected and we have our rejected. And you'll immediately notice compared to Aftershoot, we don't have the duplicate images, the images that are very similar, but still potentially rejected. We also don't have, what did Aftershoot call it, the standouts or the featured images, the ones that are the absolute best from the entire photoshoot. We simply have boiled everything down to selected and rejected. So I can immediately see that the options that you're getting here in Lightroom are not nearly as robust as what you're getting in Aftershoot at all. It's either a selection or it's a rejection. So we still need to apply a rating or a flag or something so that we can separate all of these out in Lightroom and eventually export the ones that we want. So what I'm gonna do is up here on selected, I'm going to apply a flag. I'm gonna do this little white flag here that's going to say that it is accepted. For rejected, we're gonna go ahead and hit the X flag that's going to mark it as a rejected image. And because I personally use ratings more than I use flags or colors, I'm going to apply a rating. I'm gonna make all of these images a three star. Those are images that I would deliver to a client, but they're not the best of the best. Maybe that's a five. You could also add it to a collection. We could also apply a color label here. Let's just go ahead and make these green. And then with rejected, I'm not gonna add any extra labels. So let's go ahead and hit OK here. And you can see that operation was really, really quick, but now we have all of our star ratings on all of our keeper images. So that's how you would add flags, colors, or stars to your images. But we still really haven't culled many images at all. Basically, we've just confirmed that they're in focus and that people's eyes are open. I feel like a lot of the other commercially available AI software out there has been doing that feature for years. So I don't know, it's definitely a little underwhelming. So for fun, I'm just gonna come down here to this stack of 93. And the only real way to know that you're in a stack is to look for the little number here in the corner. Let me go ahead and make this larger so that we can really see it. But unlike Aftershoot, where you have that loop view that gives you a second film strip that shows you not only the stack, but the images in the stack, the only way to see these images is to just click on this. And it's now going to expand that stack of 93 images. And you can see one of 93, two of 93, three of 93, four of 93. I don't really even know what it's doing because this isn't showing me all of the images from this family. And it's not showing me all of these tight shots from this family. It's almost like all of these are just mixed in here haphazardly. As I scroll further through this stack of 93, I mean, this is all making sense. This looks correct. But then you would think a new stack would start here, but it doesn't for some reason. But again, if I go to the beginning of the stack, like image one, two, three, four, five, they're all like just mixed in in a way that just doesn't make any sense to me. So obviously this isn't going very well for Lightroom at all. And that's not because this is a sponsored post by Aftershoot. It's just organizing these in a really frustrating way. Like it almost feels like this is beta or this shouldn't even be available for people like me to do a review on. Like this just is not working correctly. All right, so what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to reject just a few more photos so that I can get the same number of images to export as we had in Aftershoot. I think we were around 105 or 110, somewhere around there. So let's hit control A, select everything. Let's come to export. I'm not gonna resize or rename anything. Let's just hit export. Let's start our clock. And remember the goal to beat is nine seconds. That's what Aftershoot did. And wow, 130 seconds to export the exact same JPEGs back to JPEG. That's 10 times slower than what we saw with Aftershoot. So while we didn't see that big of a difference on the import, it was a huge difference on the export. So now we've reached the part of the video where I give you my conclusion and my thoughts on all of this. And if you've watched what we just experienced, I don't think that this is really gonna be all that biased or subjective. I think Lightroom really, really struggled to do anything of any usefulness. Yes, it was able to detect if the eyes were open and if the image was sharp, but it did nothing to accurately group small sets of images into stacks that are manageable. And it did nothing to actually label any of the images as duplicates or as featured images or as anything other than accept or reject. So when it comes to creating stacks and then labeling the images within those stacks in a way that will make it usable for you as a photographer, I think it's absolutely night and day difference on what these two software can do at this very moment. I would give Aftershoot a five out of five in this category, but for Lightroom, I'd give this like a two out of five. It's kind of like a novelty that they can do this right now and they're showcasing it. But in no way do I feel like what we just saw in video format is going to be usable for any photographer in any major capacity. But let's give Lightroom the benefit of the doubt. Let's say a year from now, they are able to make stacks that actually make sense and they are able to start labeling the images in ways that will make it easier for you, the photographer, to decide if you're gonna throw that image out or not. I still think Aftershoot has a huge advantage with the grid view, the loop view, and the survey mode because those are just really refined and they're really well thought out and they just work. And so I would imagine that Lightroom is going to have to implement some kind of user interface that at least copies Aftershoot because the way that they have it right now, it works great if you're trying to edit a bunch of pictures in the develop setting or you're trying to batch stuff across a tiny film strip on the bottom. But when it comes down to seeing your images in a way that makes it easy and quick to decide which images to keep or throw away, I don't think you're gonna be able to do that in Lightroom with the same efficiency that you can currently do it with Aftershoot. Another area that Aftershoot completely destroys Lightroom is they have that multi-threading. So you're gonna be able to import new images while culling another group of images and maybe exporting a third group of images. You're going to be able to do more things all at once or maybe queue it all up at once and hit go and then go leave and get on with your day and then come back to work that's completed where Lightroom, once you start any one of those processes and you start exporting your files out or importing the files in, it's gonna lock up Lightroom. And unfortunately, as far as I know, you can't do a second instance of Lightroom. So it would be nice to see Lightroom eventually allow multi-threading and have it be able to do multiple jobs at the same time. But at the moment, Lightroom is completely locked up once you start processing any of your images. Another area that's a little different with Lightroom and Aftershoot is they're dependent on the cloud. Some people like that Lightroom has a cloud system where you can sync all of your images to the cloud. And if you travel a lot, that can be useful. But some of the AI that they're using does depend on an internet connection. And in the rare occasion that you might have something that you wanna keep private, either it's a boudoir shoot or maybe you're shooting photos for a product that's being launched but you don't want anyone to know about it. Imagine if you're shooting the new iPhone or something like that. There can be some privacy issues when you connect to the cloud and start syncing over different platforms. Aftershoot does run entirely local on your own computer. So if you're traveling or you're on the plane and you wanna edit your photos without an internet connection, that makes it really easy too. But if you're the type of photographer that likes to off-source the AI editing to a server and not do it locally on your machine or you like to sync your images to a cloud-based service or something like that, there are some minor differences there as well. Another huge difference between these programs is how easy it is to quickly determine if somebody's face is in focus or if they're squinting. Yes, both softwares will automatically do that with their AI and label them. But with Aftershoot, there's two different screens that show you the key faces right there on the right-hand side. And that just makes it incredibly easy to determine if somebody is squinting or if they're out of focus or who you're gonna prioritize in that group without having to open each individual image and zooming in. And that's the part that really takes the most amount of time when determining which image is the keeper. And I feel like the key faces is one of those areas that really makes Aftershoot software stand out against Lightroom. And finally, another huge difference with Adobe Lightroom and Aftershoot is probably just their company's outlook or their ethos or their mission statement. Adobe is one of the biggest companies in the world. And if you get their Creative Cloud, they have dozens of software to do very specific tasks. And they're just not gonna be able to give the same dedication and nuance to a little feature like culling compared to Aftershoot where their whole entire mission statement is to help photographers get through thousands of images quickly and easily. I almost feel like Adobe needs to break out the culling from Lightroom and almost create a completely separate program. And maybe we'll find that that's what they do. But of course, that means now subscribing to a photo plan that includes more than just Lightroom and Photoshop. You might need this culling software. And it also means you're gonna have to import those photos into multiple software, which Adobe does do really well with their ecosystem. But all of a sudden now, it's just not all taking place in one simple-to-use piece of software like Lightroom. So this has been a really eye-opening experience doing this test side-by-side. I'd love to know what you guys think. If you've been using Lightroom's AI culling software, has it been as glitchy and unpredictable as it was in my experience here on video? Or have you found a way to actually implement this in a way that's useful for you? And if you're an Aftershoot user, I'd love to know what you think about this test. Leave your thoughts in the comments below as well. If you wanna use either of these programs, I'll put a link in the description below. This video is being released around the holiday season and Aftershoot is gonna have some really special deals going on. But if you're seeing this video months later, don't worry. I'm gonna make an evergreen link in the description below that features the absolute best deal for Aftershoot so that you can take advantage of this software as well. If you enjoy photo-related videos like this, make sure you subscribe to the fstoppers YouTube channel below. If written articles is more your thing, head over to fstoppers.com for free daily content. And if you're a photographer and you wanna participate in our monthly photo contest, head over to fstoppers.com slash contest. Each month, we set a different theme and after the critique, we give away some really cool photographic prizes. And finally, if you wanna learn how to take better pictures with your own camera, head over to fstoppers.com slash store where you can check out our full length tutorials. We've teamed up with some of the best photographers in the world to teach very specific niche genres of photography such as headshots, real estate and architecture, product photography, macro photography, portraits, weddings, swimwear photography. There's literally something for everybody and if you use the code YouTube, you can save 15% on anything that you add to your cart. For those of you keeping up with the baby countdown, I have about 10 days. So I am right on the brink. I might be called to end this video at any moment to run my wife to the hospital. But the next time that you see me for certain, I'm gonna be the dad to a brand new baby little girl. I hope you guys are having a good holiday season and I will see you very soon, hopefully.