Show notes
In this episode, I sit down with Justin Benson, co-founder of Aftershoot (and still an active wedding photographer shooting 10 weddings a year), to unpack what might be the biggest workflow shift photographers have seen in years. Aftershoot has officially expanded from an AI culling, editing, and retouching tool into a full RAW rendering platform with built-in gallery delivery — meaning you can now cull, edit, retouch, and deliver an entire session without ever opening Lightroom. Justin and I get honest about Adobe’s stagnation, why legacy software giants can’t move fast enough to serve modern photographers, and where Lightroom still holds an edge (spoiler: masking and generative patch). We dig into Aftershoot’s new gated gallery access with face recognition — a game-changer for wedding guest galleries, school portraits, sports, and event photography — and why this could replace some pricey single-purpose platforms. If you’ve tried Aftershoot in the past and walked away, or you’ve been clinging to your Lightroom-based workflow out of habit, this conversation is your nudge to reexamine everything. The cost of change has never been lower — and the cost of staying the same has never been higher. The photographers willing to rebuild their systems now are the ones pulling ahead. Chapters [00:00] Welcome [02:15] Why This Aftershoot Update Is an Exponential Leap, Not an Incremental Step [05:30] The Truth About Lightroom Loyalty (And Why It’s Not Earned) [10:00] One Linear Workflow: Cull, Edit, Retouch, Deliver — All in One Place [14:45] Setting Realistic Expectations With AI Editing [17:30] What Lightroom Still Does Better Than Aftershoot [19:30] Where Photographers Are Still Wasting the Most Time [22:00] Gated Galleries & Face Recognition: A Game-Changer for Guests, Schools & Sports [26:00] Why Now Is the Time to Reexamine Your Entire Workflow [30:00] Why Big Companies Like Adobe and Canon Can’t Keep Up Resources Mentioned Aftershoot (AI culling, editing, retouching, and gallery delivery): ShootProof Dropbox WPPI (Wedding & Portrait Photographers International) Join the community Full Transcript BEN: All right, here we go. We are recording and we are going live in three, two, one. Forgot to press the native audio button to record. So now, now I’m really recording. Now we’re really recording. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Good. Good. So we’re going live in three, two, one. Hey, you’re listening to the six figure photography podcast with Ben Hartley. Each week, a new episode is going to air to help you grow your business by winning more bookings, maximizing your profits, breaking through your limit and beliefs. Welcome to the show. I am super excited that you are here with me and my friend Justin today. Today’s an exciting episode because I don’t know, every so often something happens. Like there’s a new piece of technology, a new piece of gear, a new piece of software that comes out and it actually like changes stuff. And I want to bring it up like that because I think a lot of, a lot of times we get the hype, we get like, Hey, this is good. This is going to change things. And then we get in there and we’re like, ah, I don’t know. I don’t know if it changed much. This is actually an episode where we’re going to discuss something that is changing like a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff’s changing y’all. So we’re going to be discussing it today specifically around your workflow, which is probably one of the most exciting things to see change because it’s where most of your time is lost is in the weeds of the workflow. And so we got Justin Benson from Aftershoot on the show, Justin, welcome on in. JUSTIN: Thanks for having me. BEN: So Justin, you are co-founder of Aftershoot, but you are still an active wedding photographer in the, in the pre-roll. My friends, I asked Justin, I said, so you’re still shooting weddings? And you said a little. And I said, Oh, okay, that’s okay. Fair. That’s fair. That’s fair. How many is a little? What did you say? JUSTIN: I said 10. I got 10 weddings this year. BEN: 10 weddings is not a little. For the wedding photographers out there, that could be a full year for them. And you are also actively involved in, in Aftershoot. And so that’s crazy, man. So for those of you who don’t know, Aftershoot is an AI culling and editing and retouching. And now, well, yeah, you guys should know, a gallery delivering software. And it’s in my, in my experience is absolutely leading the market in terms of what is possible. And so I think my first question for you, Justin, by the way, is it okay if we just skip all the story stuff? You’ve been on the show like three times. I’m like, yeah, we got it, Justin. Go listen to the old episodes. I just want to get right into the meat of stuff. So I think the first question I’m curious about is this new change with Aftershoot is is kind of like, well, it reminds me of an exponential leap instead of an incremental step. There’s been a lot of incremental steps within Aftershoot, right? Like a little bit of better this, a little bit of better that, a little bit more, a little bit less, whatever it is. And so now, now with raw rendering, raw editing, raw retouching with galleries, this is like a huge leap where you’re, I mean, you’re kind of removing something like Lightroom from the picture. Is that accurate to say? JUSTIN: Yeah, I mean, we’re not we’re not replacing Lightroom yet. I mean, there’s still features that Lightroom has that we won’t have, but that’s kind of where we’re going. I mean, the whole idea is to take your workflow and kind of dump it on its head and make it faster and make it easier and just make it better. BEN: Yeah. And so walk me through this. So now within Aftershoot, you have the ability to you don’t have to export the images and then bring them into Lightroom. You don’t have to do that anymore. JUSTIN: Nope. You can keep it all inside Aftershoot. I mean, I delivered a full session. I shot at First Communion a couple weeks ago. I delivered the entire thing and didn’t open Lightroom once. BEN: So like you’ve moved the sliders from Lightroom, essentially you’ve created your own Lightroom inside of Aftershoot. JUSTIN: Yep. BEN: That’s so crazy. JUSTIN: You got sliders and, you know, masks and yeah, it’s in there. It’s all in there. BEN: And so like the problems that you were originally solving for with Aftershoot, how have those problems changed or maybe or how have you guys changed in order to solve them? Because it feels like you’re solving much bigger, more complex problems now than when you first set out to just like help photographers call. Now we’re doing something just far more comprehensive. JUSTIN: Yeah. So this was always in the plan. So like since day one, it was always we want to be a coloring, editing, retouching. We want to just be the tool you use as a photographer. You know, as a brand, I’m a photographer. So I want a company that I support, that I believe in, that is doing right by me, doing right by the industry. And obviously other companies out there, I won’t like talk poorly about them, but there’s a lot of other companies out there that just that’s not their goal. They’re not here to make the photography industry better. They’re here to make a billion dollars. BEN: So I guess I want to talk about Lightroom because I feel like there’s a lot of Lightroom loyalists and myself kind of being one of them. And I don’t know if I’m actually a Lightroom loyalist because I’m actually loyal to the tool itself. Or is it more so like familiarity became loyalty? Like it’s well, in a lot of ways, it was really the only real solution out there from day one. And so like for the photographers who who, whether it’s just because it’s ingrained in us for the last 15 years or they really love the program, they’ve got deep loyalty to Lightroom. Like, yeah, where do you think that loyalty came from, maybe? Like, is it is it still earned? JUSTIN: Earned is not I would not say it’s earned. You know, I think Lightroom is a legacy product. It’s something that’s just been around for so long and they keep pushing things into it to try and fit to the old platform and keep people happy. But at the same time, they’re kind of not really giving you the right tools and the right flow that you would actually expect or that you would want. They introduced Culling last year, I think it was. And I if you tried it, it was here’s my here’s my my biggest gripe with the whole thing. They announced that they were doing Culling. They spent an entire year launching Culling. The first iteration of it was so bad, I had to delete the catalog and start over and just like use my aftershoot Culling. I could try it. I was like, I’m curious. It was so bad I had to start over because it was like hiding images and it did all these things and just the results were terrible. And I was like, this is so disappointing. This is a billion dollar company that I’ve dumped so much money into over the years and the best they could do was terrible. Yeah. And, you know, in that same time frame, that’s when we launched aftershoot. I mean, we took one year from start to Culling and immediately it was such an improvement over anything that had been in the market yet. And so to me, that’s that’s where that loyalty is not earned. I mean, they they have the opportunity. They have the resources, the money to invest in App in Lightroom and make Lightroom a better product. But it’s not. They’re just kind of like, hey, we’re going to just stick this thing in here. Look at the patch tool. They did the generative patch first iteration. Amazing. It’s gotten worse every every iteration because it’s about saving money now. It’s about not spending as much on cloud costs and, you know, they’re reducing the capabilities in order to just make more money off of you. BEN: Yeah. And I think this is something that a lot of photographers are waking up to, is like even even in the recent price increase with Lightroom for photographers, like their creative suite, like that jumped. And I think what I’ve typically found with these legacy companies is like you’re saying what you’re saying makes sense. They have all the budget. They have all of the data. They have all the resources. And in some ways, they’re almost like too big to be nimble. Like there’s been so much like sometimes I think about the code in the back of like Photoshop, like the amount of complexity that is built this thing because it’s a legacy product, because it’s been built over all these years, like they just they don’t move fast enough. And when they do move, like sometimes I’m terrified to update like my life. I’m like, oh, man, I have a gallery that is do like I’ve got I’ve got work to deliver. I think I’m going to skip this update because I don’t know what’s going to happen if I go to if I go to update. So when you have a conversation, though, with a photographer who is just like a die hard loyalist to Adobe, to Lightroom, like how do you have that conversation with someone who genuinely loves Lightroom still? JUSTIN: I mean, I’ve yet to really meet that person, but if they you know, but but really, I mean, if they’re so devoted to it, that’s OK. We’re still going to, you know, support Lightroom catalogs and, you know, everything still works as it does before. It’s just that we’re trying to build something that’s totally new and and familiar at the same time. I mean, when you open aftershoots interface, it’s not like you’re totally lost. The sliders are in the same positions. They feel similar. The touch, the feel, all the coloring is so similar to Lightroom, like you would have to really sit there and look at them side by side to see any difference at all between what you open up an aftershoot versus Lightroom. So we’ve done a really, really good job of trying to keep what we know as Lightroom users while expanding it. I mean, it’s not in this iteration that’s launching now, but I can tell you our our new masking tools, you’re going to be able to just click on a background and it’s going to mask it or click on a subject and it masks it. And it’s like there’s such easy things that should have just been built into a billion dollar company’s tool that we’re like, hey, why is this not why do you have to have like I don’t know if you’ve used the masking since they updated it like three years ago. That was when they did that update. I was so mad because they took a pretty simple masking process, made it more complicated. And I was like, this makes zero percent like like zero percent logic was put into this process. And now I’m like, oh, I have to click like seven times to add and remove parts of a mask. Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. And now it’s like, oh, we’re going to click on it and aftershoot, like it should be easier. Yeah, it’s harder. BEN: And I think that this is one of those things that, OK, so when I first heard about this, I was like, cool, like, all right, we’ll see it. Like I was like that was I was I was I don’t know if I would say I was pessimistic, but I was like, I’m so I’ve been listen, man, I’ve been using Lightroom for like 15 years. It’s it’s so when I hear that there is something that is that I can do all the same things inside of Lightroom, but now inside of the native company, like the software they already use, it just felt like I don’t know if it’s too good to be true. And then I actually opened up and you’re right, dude, I was like, oh, this is this is just like how it is. I didn’t my brain didn’t need to get reprogrammed, retrained. It was just oh, this is exactly how it already is and how it feels. I just don’t need to leave. And I’ll be honest, that was probably. And I’m sure you’ve heard this one of the the the biggest maybe like time drains that I experience, even maybe mentally of having to like move out of aftershoot after it had called edited into another piece of software in the Lightroom or whatever you guys want to use and then do my editing there. And then if I wanted to do retouching like that back and forth, that was always that was always like a big hiccup, you know, for me and in a in a company that’s all about saving time and being able to walk away and like it be done. Yeah, that was just a big hurdle. And so like what I don’t know, this just it feels like it really did completely change my full workflow of how I’ve how I’ve been doing things. And I guess I’m curious, do you feel like photographers are are ready or willing to change their systems and processes, their workflows for the ways that they’ve kind of been dug into doing for so long because it feels like it’s time to reexamine the post production workflow overall? JUSTIN: I think I say this every time we have a launch. There’s no better time than now to get involved because you can help shape it so you can you can use our raw rendering tool and say, you know what, I typically use it this way and I want to keep using it that way because it makes more sense. And then, OK, that’s the way we’re going to go. We’re going to help build this in such a way that you can do it in your old traditional style in our new platform. And like I’ve said it about culling and retouching and editing and like every time I’m like, hey, just just use it. Give us the feedback because I’ve I mean, I’ve already shared tons of my feedback, but nobody really wants to listen to me in aftershoot, not because of any other reason than I’m very stubborn. Right. So like I am I am set in my ways. I have my workflow in Lightroom and this is how I want everything to work. And they’re like, OK, yeah, but you’re an old dude. Like you’ve been doing this since 2011. You know, like what about the next generation of photographers? What are they looking at and how do they want this platform to work? And it’s forced me to kind of change a little bit of how I work. But it’s made my my workflow better. So I’ve kind of adapted and adjusted over all these years because like, no, this is w…
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