The Elusive One-Click Instant Fix

From the very earliest days of digital photo editing software, developers have been trying to create the ultimate instant fix button. Whether it's labelled “quick fix”. “auto-correct” or “auto-balance”, google had “I’m feeling lucky” and later “auto-awesome”, the goal has always been the same: to make photo editing as simple and effortless as possible. However, despite numerous attempts, none of these one-click fixes have truly lived up to their promise.

The trouble is, while digital cameras have improved significantly over the years, they still can't cover every situation. And even when they do capture a great shot, there are often still some focus and exposure issues that need to be addressed. This is where photo editing software comes in, but finding the perfect balance between automated fixes and manual editing can be a challenge and all too often very tedious.

Over time, I started to warm up to auto-fix tools and even created my own preset for Lightroom called SDR+. However, I didn't use it much, as I found it was often quicker and more trustworthy to just fiddle with the exposure sliders manually.

It wasn't until I started experimenting with Macphun's Aurora HDR that I really began to see the potential of what AI (Artificial Intelligence, in the form of Neural Networks) could do. This software used the networks to segment the image into different areas, such as the sky, foreground, background, buildings, and foliage, and potentially correct those areas separately. However, this information wasn't shown to the user. It would have been nicer to have access to it through prebuilt masks. Just be patient that feature would eventually come.

However, the developers' approach was somewhat arrogantly more focused on "we’ll do it better than you" and releasing regular updates for users and expecting them to sit back and enthusiastically pay for what they were being fed.

Skylum’s Photo Lemur showed great promise when I was invited to beta test it. Having previously tested Nic's Collection and Snapseed when they were still Macphun, and also looking at a pre-release Windows version of Luminar, I could see that the big difference with Photo Lemur was its simplicity and ability to batch process many files in a reasonable amount of time. It did a good job, although not outstanding, especially for social media where post-processing excellence would go unnoticed. It's biggest appeal that you don’t have to do anything was also its biggest weakness, you really can not control anything. Still I bought it straight away and still occasionally use it.

Macphun became Skylum and their software creations Aurora HDR and Photo Lemur were great examples of how AI can enhance the editing experience and made it easier and more efficient for photographers to create beautiful images.

Looking back AI within photo editing was still in its early stages, slowly making small incremental steps usually with room for improvement. The really rapid expansion of the tasks AI could perform and the rate of improvement were about to explode