Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Tried and True with the Dash of Woo, where we blend rock solid tips with a little bit of magic. I'm Renee Bowen, your host, life and business coach and professional photographer at your service. We are all about getting creative, diving into your business and playing with manifestation over here. So are you ready to get inspired and have some fun? Let's dive in. Hey, hey, welcome back to Tried and True with the Dash of Woo. I'm your host, renee Bowen, and today's episode is going to be pretty photographer specific.

Speaker 1: 0:33

So if you are an avid listener of the show and side note, thank you so much If you are, you know that I like to talk about a lot of different stuff here. Right, tried and true with the dash of woo. So we run the gamut. We go from strategies like marketing to very specific topics, like I'm going to be speaking about today, like editing for photographers as well as shows, all about mindset and different modalities and very woo topics. So that's just kind of how my brain works and I'm interested in a lot of different things and we are more than just our businesses. So we talk about a lot of different stuff here and that's by design, but I always like to give you guys a heads up and let you know what the show is going to be about. So, if you are a photographer, today's episode is going to be talking about how much time and energy and creative space I save by using something called Evoto AI. And if you are a photographer, you might've heard of it and you might've heard me talking about it on a past episode, because I have mentioned it here and there. I have been using Evoto AI for about two years and it's been an absolute game changer for me and how fast I can get through my editing. And now let me just preface this by saying I was already fast, and I'm not trying to gloat when I say that I've been doing this a long time.

Speaker 1: 1:57

I've been a photographer for 20 years and I have tried lots and lots and lots of different workflows, but over the last I would say, 8 to 10 years, I feel like I've pretty much mastered my editing process and there was a time where I was outsourcing a lot of my editing, which I am a big fan of. I'm a big fan of anything that's going to move your business forward if it makes sense for you and your business. So it's not just like a blanket statement of like just outsource. That may or may not be the right answer for you at the time. For me, when I was doing it, it worked out really really well and I still send out really heavy edits. So if there are like really really specific, serious retouching things that need to be done to a handful of images, I'm not going to do those, I'm going to send them out, and if I can't get my AI programs to do it for me, sending it out is the best option at that point for me, because time is money and time is my most valuable commodity. I hate wasting time and I know that as a photographer, your editing is not a waste of time, because obviously that is how you finish your images.

Speaker 1: 3:10

But there are a lot of you guys who are spending eight and 10 hours on one portrait gallery. I'm not even talking about a wedding, I'm talking about, like, a portrait gallery. That's way too long, you guys. That's way too long. You guys, especially nowadays, like I'm sorry, but there's no reason for you to be spending that much time. If you are spending that much time, you either haven't really gotten the workflow down, like you're still experimenting, which is fine, or you are too much in your head which is basically what I find is more often than not the case is that you get in your head, you get very. What I find is more often than not the case is that you get in your head, you get very emotionally attached to these images, and so even the culling process can take you a long time. So it's taking you two hours, two, three hours to call just one portrait session, and then you have to edit the whole gallery.

Speaker 1: 4:00

So we're going to talk today about how you can cut that down drastically. So here's how it's going to work. I'm going to walk you guys through my process, talk you through my import, like everything, how my workflow, how I import and edit my images. Okay, so I'm going to talk you through those steps and then I'm actually going to do just a little bit not a ton, because I realized that most of you guys listen to this and don't watch over on YouTube, but I do want to have this option for you. I am going to walk you through like a screen flow of just some of the basic things that Evoto can do, just sort of walk you through the tools I use it mainly for, and show you just how quickly it is, just so you can get a little intro into how easy it is and what the interface looks like. A lot of you guys are already using Evoto, but they also have an incredible summer special happening right now that I want to tell you guys about. So, even if you've used a Vodo for a long time, you need to know about their special happening, because you can save a lot of money.

Speaker 1: 5:11

So it's not just for new clients, it's for existing clients as well, and we are also partnering up and doing a giveaway. So here's the information on the giveaway. I'm also going to put this in the show notes and then we're going to get to sort of the meat of this episode. Okay, so, first of all, the giveaway Evoto is going to be giving away some credits to you, and I'm also going to be giving away a 45 minute strategy call, so you can win both of those things. One person is going to win both of those things.

Speaker 1: 5:39

The way that you enter this giveaway is that you're going to follow both me at Renee Bowen and Evoto AI over on Instagram. Everything is tagged below in the show notes. You need to be following both of us and then you need to go ahead and like and comment and share today's reel about today's episode. So it's the one that was posted this morning. It's the one promoting this episode. The information for the giveaway is listed in the caption, so you'll know that that's the right one. You're going to like it and then you're going to comment by tagging three photographer friends in the comments they have to be real people, do not be tagging Beyonce on this thread, please and then you're going to share that reel on your story and mention what your favorite takeaway from this episode is. So you have to like, you have to comment three photographer friends and then you have to share it on your story and that is your entry into the giveaway to win the strategy call with me and all those Evoto credits. So all those details are going to be in the caption as well for you. You can also earn a bonus entry if you post a before and after photo that is edited with Evoto on your feed or on your stories. But you got to tag both me and Evoto AI so that we can make sure we see it and to make sure you get entered in the contest. There's also a hashtag we're using called Evoto with Renee, and that's also listed in the caption of that reel and in the show notes here.

Speaker 1: 7:08

The deadline to enter is July 16th, because winners are going to be announced on my Instagram and contacted on July 18th. Okay, so that's the amazing giveaway that we're doing. So you guys all go and enter that, because I know you want some of those credits, because Evoto is a different kind of platform. You don't just purchase it, you purchase credits, and you can do that by having a subscription and you can decide what level you would like. So those credits are very, very valuable. I don't know about you guys, but I blow through them because, especially if you shoot events, I don't do a ton of events anymore, but the events that I have edited with Evoto are so lightning fast I'll never I'll never go back to not using it. But real quick, their Evoto summer days deal that they have going on right now and through July 17th is that you can get up to 25% off across all their packages. So it started last night on the 8th, it's going to end on the 17th and that's whether there's a subscription or non-subscription, and it's worldwide.

Speaker 1: 8:15

And if you haven't seen their latest update that they just launched, we now have lint and dirt and hair removal. That was one of the big things that a lot of people were asking for. Clothing edge adjustments, there's more AI body cropping and then there's AI red eye removal as well. So these are all just little additions that they have updated us with, and they're constantly doing it. So that's one of the things I wanted to talk about today is one of the reasons why I love it is they're constantly adding new features. When I started using it two years ago, I mainly was drawn to it for their acne removal.

Speaker 1: 8:54

I am a high school senior photographer. I see a lot of acne and I always tell my clients anything that's not going to be on your body long-term, like acne, I'm going to retouch that. I'm not going to retouch something that's a part of you moles or I mean. Unless you ask me specifically to do certain things right, I'm not going to change the way you look. I'm kind of a big believer in that. However, acne, you don't want to have that in your final images and However, acne, you don't want to have that in your final images, and over the years, I've used various different ways of doing this right, like there's frequency separation inside of Photoshop, which I think is so not fun and very time consuming, but it is probably one of the better options, just because it retains the skin texture.

Speaker 1: 9:42

I was also using portraiture for a while, which is a plugin for Lightroom and Photoshop, but I was using it through Lightroom and that was okay, but it tended to make the skin look a little too plastic and I don't love that and our senior clients don't love that. They do want you to retouch them, but they don't want to look too retouched. That's a big, big big thing with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. They don't want their skin to look super fake, okay. So I was initially drawn to Evoto AI because of their incredible according to other photographers at that point feature where you could edit the skin. So I tried it out on a male client and I was blown away on how incredibly fast. It's a slider. It literally is like a click, okay, and it takes it away but still retains the texture of their skin, which is really important, especially with male clients, because otherwise it can make it look like your male clients have makeup on when they don't. I mean, it's one thing if they actually are wearing makeup and they want to, but if they don't. You don't want to make it look like they look so perfect and plasticky just because you had a lot of acne to edit out in these images. So this feature alone is worth it for me in photo AI and then since then I have obviously started to use it across the board and in various other ways, which I'll show you. But before we go into some of those features, I just want to make sure you guys understand how important this is.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Okay, because time is money, and I know not everyone listening to this podcast is a portrait photographer. I know that not everyone prices the way that I price. I'm not about telling you you have to do it a certain way, but I think we can all agree that the editing bottleneck is a pretty common struggle for most photographers, and it's not just the time, it's the inconsistency. I hear this a lot from photographers that their color profile just isn't as consistent as they want. Or even though they're using Lightroom and they're batching, they can't get their images to look as consistent as they would like. And this can also be an issue if you are outsourcing.

Speaker 1: 12:01

So outsourcing was all the rage for a long time. Because time is money. That was the main reason we need to get faster at it, but it's also really difficult to nail that profile down with someone who isn't you. That was actually the thing that kept me from outsourcing for so long was I just believed that lie that I couldn't teach anyone to do it exactly like I did it which wasn't true, by the way. It just was a learning curve. It just took a minute. So in the long run, yes, it did pay off, but now I just use AI, and it is far cheaper than hiring someone to do the editing for me, because, at the end of the day, I actually do like editing my photos.

Speaker 1: 12:45

I just didn't like the time that it was taking, so that was one of the reasons why I got really fast at it. I would set a timer and I always tell this to my coaching students too you have to get fast, you have to get fast. Nobody wants to be sitting at the computer for eight hours. There's no reason in the world you should be doing that right now, and I still hear photographers doing that, and I'm not even talking about new photographers. So if you're brand new and you're just starting out, yeah, you're going to need to spend some time doing it and spend some time experimenting and getting to know the platforms that you're using. But if you've been in business for a little bit and it's still taking that long, no, you got to cut that down. You have to. You can't serve your clients and be present for them if you're spending all this time calling and editing your photos.

Speaker 1: 13:31

I also want to address really quickly the whole AI concept. I know that there are a lot of people. What I've seen lately, especially on the internet and just in my communities, is that there's two different groups of people. There's one group of people who is very interested in AI and, while they may not be pros at it, they're open to it and interested in learning and they're using things like ChatGPT to help them with various pieces of their business. And then there's another group of people who is just vehemently against all AI, and I totally get that. I understand why somebody would be against AI. I get it truly.

Speaker 1: 14:18

But, as I've said before on other podcast episodes where I've kind of spoken about AI, it's not going anywhere. The genie is out of the bottle, it's not going to get put back in, and I have always been that person, not even just a photographer, but just like the kind of person who, if there's something new and I don't understand it, I want to. I don't want to be left out of that conversation, especially because I run two businesses and especially because I'm also an educator in the field. I need to know what's going on out there. Even if I don't use it, I do need to have some sort of knowledge about it and I'm interested in learning about new things. That's the thing. It's interesting to me to find out all the things that it can do. I mean ChaiGBT.

Speaker 1: 15:09

I've been using it since the day it came out and while I am not, there are some people out there doing some crazy, crazy, amazing stuff with AI and ChaiGBT and video and all kinds of stuff. I'm not doing that. I use it daily. I will tell you that I'm a very, very avid user. I pay for the plus version, so I use that and it helps me across the board with my business.

Speaker 1: 15:33

But I don't want to segue too much into that, because this episode is not about that. But AI as a whole can be really, really intimidating for a lot of people and I don't want it to be. I want to try and help you access it if it's something you're interested in. And so now AI in terms of editing or creating images, we're going to start to see and we've already started to see some of it online the creation from start to finish, of creating a video, a person, an image that is 100% AI generated. That's here and it's really hard to tell the difference now. You can still tell, but it's getting harder. So even if you're against AI, you do owe it to yourself to learn about it so that you can be discerning, so that you're not sucked in by what's really not real online. So that's my little spiel on that, real quick. But this episode, obviously, is going to be speaking more to people who are interested in learning about it and to photographers, specifically, who are sick and tired of spending hours and hours on their editing, because there's literally no reason for you to do it.

Speaker 1: 16:42

Evoto AI is the most robust system I have ever ever come across and, yes, it kind of feels like cheating. I'm just going to say it. There's been a lot of us talking about that. It feels like you're cheating, but here's the thing you guys know that I am a higher end, full service portrait photographer. That's my main thing. Seniors I also do branding and headshots. But seniors are my thing, right.

Speaker 1: 17:05

People pay a premium price when they come to me to get the results that I give them, and I think that there's this belief in the photographer community that it needs to take you a lot of time and you need to work really hard and you need to suffer, basically in order to charge those prices. But that's not true. People are paying you for how good your product is and just because it takes you a fraction of the time it used to take you to edit. When you start shifting to Evoto AI, it doesn't mean you need to be charging less. It doesn't mean that you're actually cheating. It just feels like that to us because we are so used to slaving away at the computer. But people are still paying for your expertise and this tool costs money, so you do need to be charging appropriately to use it. I see this all the time in the Evoto group on Facebook. People get a little upset about the subscription model and how it's a little bit different than some of the other editing services that we use. But you're a professional photographer, you should be charging appropriately for your work and if you're not, that's a problem because then you can't afford the tools you need to create the images.

Speaker 1: 18:18

I saw something, just as a little side note. I saw this TikToker the other day who is she's a wedding photographer, so it's a little different, but she's talking a little bit about pricing and she was saying I see all these photographers talking about how much their gear costs and that's why you know when they're talking about their pricing and the reason that they charge more money is because their gear costs as much money. She's like that does not matter, that does not matter. Your prices are your prices. And while I get the takeaway here, the takeaway is that your prices are your prices. The cost of doing business actually does matter. Yeah, your gear is going to cost a lot of money across the board. If you're a professional photographer, you're going to need at least one or two backup cameras. You're going to need multiple lenses, so our gear just costs money. That's just part of doing business.

Speaker 1: 19:06

Your cost of doing business, just like this, is Any of your editing tools. That goes into your cost of doing business. You need to run those numbers and get very real with yourself about how much money you're spending in your business, because if you're spending thousands of dollars on tools and you're charging a very low price and giving away all the digitals. You literally cannot create a sustainable business that way, so I just want to make sure you know that it's important to have those numbers. Okay, you've got to know what that cost of doing business is. You do, but at the end of the day, yeah, your prices are your prices and when you are priced appropriately, investing in a photo is like a no brainer because you are saving so much time and your clients will appreciate how fast you are as well. That is consistently one of the comments and reviews I get back on even just Google reviews. People will comment how fast I've gotten those images back to them. I can get a headshot gallery proofed, a proofing gallery set for them within hours. I don't want to make them wait days. So this is a really big piece of streamlining your workflow and this is something that you, as a photographer, really need to dig into to make it work for you.

Speaker 1: 20:22

What works for me may or may not work for you. I've never been, for instance, one of those photographers who can schedule certain weeks of the month to shoot this week, to edit this week. To deliver galleries this week, to do in-person sales this week. That's just not how my brain works and it's not feasible. It's not realistic for me. I have a lot of clients who come in from out of state, so it depends on when they're going to be here, right? So if I'm only shooting one week out of the month and they're not coming, that's not going to work for me. It just has never worked for me. But it's really important for you to understand and implement your own workflows for shooting and for editing. So I'm going to walk you guys through the Avoto platform in just a second to show you all the reasons why I love it so much.

Speaker 1: 21:11

But first let me just walk you through my process from importing my images and how I work with them. So when I go to import my images, I use a small little SSD drive as my working drive, my external drive. So I work primarily off of a MacBook Pro, and I know that I've talked about this before in social posts and things like that. But as a side note, I lease my computers through the Apple Business Program, so I get a brand new computer every two years, just about the time when it's starting to not work as well. And so if you're a professional photographer and you're running a business, you can do this through the Apple Business Leasing Program. All you have to do is get in touch with your nearest Apple store and ask to speak to the business program person in charge of leasing and they will get you set up. I promise you it is worth it. You just get a brand new machine every two years. So all that to say, I use a MacBook Pro, so I don't like to keep anything on my actual computer, on my laptop no images, nothing that I'm editing or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 22:08

I keep all my images on a little small external, my working drive. So when I import my card, I am importing through Lightroom. I don't use like Photo Mechanic or anything like that. I import through Lightroom. Now here's the thing. You can do this with Evoto. You can import straight into Evoto. Evoto basically does everything that Lightroom does. So eventually that's probably what I'm going to end up doing, but for now I import the card, the images, to my working drive and I back them up to another drive at the same time because I want to have a backup of them, and then from there I'm going to do my base color edit.

Speaker 1: 22:46

The reason I'm doing it in Lightroom still is because I've been doing it like that for a million years and I was already really fast at it. So I have my own presets that I've created that I can just basically do a very quick color edit, and you know I I do my calling in there as well. So I'll call first and I'll do my color edit in Lightroom. And all of that really takes me 45 minutes maybe max give or take. Sometimes on a slow day it'll take me an hour. But I cull my images really quickly and I highly suggest you get good at that as well. So I'm going to do my color edit and then from there I'm just going to open them in Evoto.

Speaker 1: 23:28

So when you go into Evoto you can either bring them in as raw, you can bring them in as JPEGs, you can bring them as TIFFs, you can bring them in from a catalog, from Lightroom, or you can bring them in from a folder on your computer. So for me I just like to kind of bring them in from Lightroom if I can. But I have done it the opposite way and what I'm showing you here today will be just like I brought them in as a folder and then once I edit them in Evoto, they're done. I just have to export them and they're finished. The cool thing about it, too, is that if you have to go in and do any additional edits, this is especially good for those of us who do branding and headshots and things like that, because they're proofing galleries that I'm delivering. I'm not going to do complete and full edits necessarily on those. I'm going to get them pretty close.

Speaker 1: 24:15

A lot of times you'll have clients who want something more in the way of retouching. They'll have a special request. Well, you can go back into your Avoto folder and just make those adjustments and you're not going to get charged twice for that export. As long as that image is still there on your drives or wherever it's located, you can just go in and do a re-edit on that and then just export it again without being charged, because the way Avoto works is that you're charged when you export, but if it's a previously edited in a photo image, you're not going to be charged twice. So that's nice.

Speaker 1: 24:51

Okay, so you're going to want to create a project first and then import the images. So this is one of the new features that they just came out with is that you can now, like I said before, you can do everything in here, and now we can even color code and stay organized within the project. So it's getting very, very intuitive. So I'm just going to name it that. So again, you can like import from folders and import a Lightroom catalog. I'm just going to import a folder right now because I want to bring in raw files and show you guys what that looks like. There's a ton of images here. I'm just going to like grab a few. I'm not going to grab, like, all of these images. So now you can kind of see it's going to open up all of these different things here, okay, and these are the raw images. And then on this right-hand side here you've got all of these different modules here.

Speaker 1: 25:43

This is your color profile, which is where we are here, and so you can upload references. You can create your own like references here. Like you can put certain things on it again, like it'll it'll tell you all of the sync settings and stuff. Obviously, like you can adjust it if you want it to be a little bit more so essentially presets, right. Again, you can just sort of play around and create your own. You can do it if you want it to be a little bit more. So essentially presets right Again, you can just sort of play around and create your own. You can do your own just base color edit over here, just like everything else that you're probably used to seeing in other platforms. You can have filters. There's filters here, there's lots of different ones that they have in the system itself and then you can slide it as well.

Speaker 1: 26:27

Just kind of want to show you, guys, just what some of these adjustments look like on your own. So if I want to create a profile for myself like you can do that. You can create that and have it set for your preferences. Everything is here Color grading, even lens corrections, grain detail, like everything is already there. So by default they're going to sharpen your images. So you might want to go in and just like lower that if you don't want your images overly sharpened or things like that. So that's like the color edit, but like this is kind of the profile with the little face here. So that's like the color edit, but like this is kind of the profile with the little face here. The portrait retouching is pretty amazing, because I'm going to just show you he's just got a little bit of acne, a little bit of scarring, you know, stuff like that, stuff like these things, right, you just want to kind of clean up some stuff without it being too heavy handed. So let's give me a, let me get a different images, if I can find one that I think will work well, coming in pretty tight on the face. Here Again, I'm not going to do like a whole, like hour long tutorial on this, because literally Evoto does so much, but I just wanted to show you how fast this stuff is Okay.

Speaker 1: 27:42

So on the face refinement, you have something called freckles and acne. Again, we don't really want to take away freckles unless somebody asks you to, but I would never just do that on my own Right. So if I take them off, like if I, you can tell like right away if I take them off, like he has like absolutely perfect skin, but kind of too perfect in my opinion. So I want to kind of like keep it here and I'm going to drag that freckle slider all the way back down because I don't want to take away his freckles and sometimes it can, you know, be hard to discern what's a freckle and what's not right. But I want the acne to be gone, and so that basically takes it away, and if you press the space bar at any point, you can kind of see what it's done and it seems kind of subtle, but then when you see it you're like, oh yeah, that actually does look pretty good.

Speaker 1: 28:35

One of my favorite features of Ivoto is this dark circle situation. Like, all you have to do is this and you can take away eye bags and dark circles in a second Like look, and I just love that feature. I think that with everything, obviously you can overuse it, but I really dig it. Okay, so there's that again. We haven't really done the color edit on this. It's still just like the raw image, but I just kind of wanted to show you what the face refining, the portrait retouching, could look like.

Speaker 1: 29:00

Um, as you move down here, you can do all kinds of stuff, like with guys I don't know if you guys work with a lot of teenage boys, um, but or just anybody. In general, lip flakes and and lip wrinkles are kind of a thing right Like. So I get a lot of dry lips here in California. It's so dry here. We live in the desert, so this is a really nice thing to add to it, because it just takes it away without again making it look like they have makeup on. The double chin thing is kind of nice. It creates a little bit of shadowing. So basically what you would be doing with dodging and burning it's done and they have a whole profile for wrinkles. Obviously he doesn't need that kind of help right here, but it is like you can even like take away 11 lines. Like it's kind of amazing and it's very, very fast. It's just a slider and you just kind of refine it and then you can save it to your presets. That's the really cool thing. So then your preset will be there, so all you have to do is just click it when you come back in.

Speaker 1: 29:56

I'm really a big fan of the neck wrinkles as well, because a lot of even like younger females especially we'll have, they'll have like a little bit of a line on their neck and they're very picky about it. My senior girls are super picky about that. That takes it away completely. Armpit retouch is really nice. So a lot of my girls who wear strapless things, um, they're don't love the the space here between, like, the arm and the armpit. You can use the armpit touch up there and it just kind of cleans it up a little bit very fast again.

Speaker 1: 30:28

So if we go into like a little bit of the skin retouching, I wanted to show you what it could look like, cause you can. Just what I like to do with guys is just use the dodge and burn and not any softening, because right now you can still see like he's got some texture to his skin and it's not like super, super smooth, right. But if we start playing with this, it just creates a little bit of sculpting without softening, and you can see, if I keep pressing the before and after, what it does. So I think that's pretty rad. You got textured, smoothing, frequency separation Like you can get very specific with this texture smoothing, frequency separation Like you can get very specific with this Um. And then obviously, the actual skin softening and they also have the body skin as well. So it's not just the face skin, so you can soften the body skin. You can even and do frequency separation on the body skin as well.

Speaker 1: 31:23

He doesn't really have a lot of body skin showing and there's also a spot for tattoos. You can get rid of tattoos with a click. I just had to use this a couple weeks ago. One of my clients is a college graduate and she had a sleeveless thing on and she's in the process of getting her tattoos removed. So one of her tattoos looks like and it's a process, right, but it even picked up on that tattoo, even though she is getting it removed. All I had to do is toggle that on and it took away all all the tattoos and all the images, like it was incredible. So that was really fun. And then the other thing that's really awesome are the body blemishes Cause. Then, like, see how he has a little bit of the acne on the neck. You can get rid of that very, very easily and any like girls, if you've got like any kind of like little red bumps or like you know little different things on the skin, you can get rid of it very quickly and easily with the body blemishes slider. I'm also love that I can, um, retouch the body skin on my senior girls because they're wearing dresses and shorts and things like that, and it just does like instant awesomeness. For the legs, I will say like it's so easy and it doesn't make them look plastic. So that's nice.

Speaker 1: 32:40

Um, you can get very, very specific with all of this stuff. So, again, like wouldn't necessarily use every piece of it, but you've got a lot of options here. You can add skin texture to it. You can unify the face complexion and tone, like. So if someone has very uneven skin tone, that helps it very quickly and easily. And you can use it with the body as well. This is a very common thing with senior girls. Especially, the face and the body might be not exactly the same color because a lot of these girls use self-tanner and things like that. So these sliders right here are super helpful to even out the skin complexion, which is amazing. Skin radiance. You can like add some radiance to it, make it brighter, make it rosier, and then you can also do some serious reshaping, like you can get very specific with these things so you can change people's faces. I'm not advocating that you do, I'm just telling you what you can do. I just wanted to kind of show you some stuff Face size, jaw, hairline. You can do all kinds of different things here. Like it's very quick, very fast Again, not saying that you should be doing all of that, but it's definitely there for you and there are instances where you may need to use these or want to use these I work with.

Speaker 1: 34:03

I do a lot of headshots. I work with a lot of women my age and their forties and fifties and they're like do all the things to me so that I can look like me, but me on my best day. And I think that, as a photographer, that's our goal, right, we want our clients to feel confident. I also educate them on the fact that I feel like you still do need to look like you, right? We can't make you. If you're literally in your 60s, you're not going to want to go ahead and make it look like you're in your 20s. Could I do it? Yes, and could I do it very quickly? Yes, but that's not necessarily the goal. We want you to look like you realistically, but just refined, okay. So that's kind of my goal.

Speaker 1: 34:44

With editing, just across the board, you can even manipulate the smile and then the teeth. He's not showing teeth, but you can whiten the teeth. Here. The eyes are really awesome. I love brightening the eyes. Here, again, you have to like sort of play with the sliders a little bit and get very specific Like how white do you want? The whites, the reflections, the iris flares, all that kind of stuff. For me I'm just going for a little brightness and, you know, a little bit of a pop to the eyes. I will tell you, the glasses glare slider is incredible Lifesaver. So fast, so easy. Because a lot of times, especially for headshots, and even not even just headshots, but working outside with people with glasses, oh my gosh, it can be really, really difficult. And this is a game changer Like you can get rid of glasses glare in a second. It's amazing. You can even put makeup and contour and highlights and eyebrows and eye makeup on people, like they even added like stuff for guys, you know, so you can do all kinds of stuff with that.

Speaker 1: 35:50

The hair is really awesome. I'm a big fan of using this for getting rid of the stray hairs. So like it just takes away of the little of the hairs that he's kind of got going on there. You can go pretty hardcore with it or you can go stay, stay in the middle. Um, smoothing of the hair. It kind of smooths it out. Again, you gotta be careful because sometimes it can look a little too fake when you use it too much. Shine enhancement is just going to like enhance the natural highlights anyway, and then you can even like get very, very specific with retouching hands and then body reshaping, if that's your thing as well. You can just do the AI, where it kind of does it intuitively what I love for a lot of my seniors, especially as the de-wrinkling of the clothing like it's just kind of amazing how fast you can do it. And again, you have to be a little careful because sometimes it could look a little too fake. So you want to watch that. And then you can also go into the backdrop changers. So backdrop changers like this is really awesome for headshots.

Speaker 1: 36:54

I'm going to open that up in a second just to show you guys really quickly what you can do with this, because I think this is amazing for headshot photographers. Like, oh my God, you can even connect to your camera. You can crop, like there's all kinds of tools you can do. Oh, and you can also come up here in case you needed to do any specific like liquefying and warping. You can do that here as well as remove things. You can do spot healing, you can do patch and you can do clone stamping as well. I'm not going to get into all of that, because this video would be super, super long.

Speaker 1: 37:29

I just wanted to make sure I could show you the skin up close, because I feel like that is a really, really, really big selling point for us portrait photographers, especially those of us who work with teenagers, but everybody honestly. So let me open up something else real quick. Okay, so now we have an older woman headshots I wanted to show you really quickly so again I could go in and I could do some serious refinements. Um, I have presets for these already that I've created, but I wanted to show you just very quickly how you could do it. So like if I wanted to do any of this I could make sure you know this is kind of where I needed it to be. She doesn't really have any issues with that sort of stuff. There's a little bit of a face shine, so you can reduce some face shine. You can do some dark circle and eye bag help. Here Again, I always educate my clients and tell them it's not about making you look a thousand years younger, but just you and your best day. And all the women that I work with want me to reduce their double chin. They tell me that from the get-go. So you can kind of go through, do some refinements, do some skin retouching. Again, I'm just sort of like going through and just showing you really quickly what you can do. You would want to make sure you create these on your own, so that's so you can see the before and after.

Speaker 1: 38:53

Mainly what I wanted to show you for her was this backdrop situation, because I think this is such a game changer. So, first of all, you can upload your own backdrops, which is amazing. Uh, let's go up to this. So like it's a solid backdrop refinement, you can toggle on distractions being removed, so like there's no distractions in this, but if there were, it would clean it up. You can do it. You know auto detect the solid backdrop so it kind of makes it clean.

Speaker 1: 39:22

And now they added unify lighting, so you could see how on that side it was more shadowy. That unifies it and again, you can sort of like play with it and see what you wanted it to do and how luminance and back and forth. Like you can make it brighter, you can make it darker. You can also do, you know, color banding removal and you can go down and change the backdrop if you want to as well. So obviously, you know, depends on how we want this to look and how you want it to be blended. But yeah, it's kind of amazing, I think, the background changer and just how you can clean up the background so quickly. So if I go back in, you can see like just that right there.

Speaker 1: 40:15

Now the cool thing too that I wanted to mention that I forgot to mention before is that you can just copy paste. You can just sync up all your images like you can just like in any other platform, so you can just copy paste them very, very quickly. Obviously, you're going to want to make presets to make this whole process quicker for you as well, and then, when you're ready, you would just export. It's going to export it however you tell it to and wherever you tell it to, and it'll tell you how many images you're exporting right there. It's very intuitive. So I wanted to show you really quick too before I hop out of this.

Speaker 1: 40:48

So I showed you before the stray hairs removal, right. Well, the smoothing of the hair is really nice for women especially who are talking about who have like a lot of stray hairs or flyaway hairs, because you can see like so that's without it, and if I toggle it on, it'll just smooth it just a little bit Again. You don't want it to go like too too crazy with that and then you can tame the frizzy hair. The shine enhancement will just you can see right there on the top it's going to produce a little bit more shine where there already is shine. You can also darken gray hair as well. You can change the color of the hair if you want. We're not going to do that hair if you want, we're not going to do that. I just wanted to show you how awesome that piece of it was, because, yeah, it's really awesome.

Speaker 1: 41:40

You guys, I could go through that all day and show you all the little tips and tricks, but there's a lot of people talking about it. It's easy to learn. Honestly, it's one of the easiest programs that I've ever learned. If you've edited ever before in any platform, you will find this extremely easy to pick up. But I hope that this gave you some insight into maybe a light at the end of your tunnel and how fast you can actually get in your editing process, because, honestly, that is one of the biggest things you can do for your business is just get very efficient at what you do. You are going to have a much better profit margin at the end of the day.

Speaker 1: 42:20

It's not about, oh, I have to suffer to charge a lot of money. Remember what I said People are coming to you for your expertise, and, yeah, they're paying you for how fast you are as well. If it's taking you two weeks to deliver a gallery and somebody down the street can do it, you know, in two days, people are willing to pay more, premium prices for that as well. All of these things need to go into your pricing, and this is not an episode about pricing, but you guys know that it's kind of hard for me to like not talk about that. So I want to make sure you guys enter the giveaway, because, whether you are an avid user like myself, we could all use the credits, and especially if you're brand new, though, and you're looking at trying it, this is a great way to do.

Speaker 1: 42:57

It is to win this giveaway. Plus, you get to win a strategy session with me, so if you have anything going on in your business and you need help with pricing, you need help with marketing any of that. If it's mindset I got you, that is all stuff we can use for your strategy session, and so one person will win that and some of Voto credits, even if you don't win, because there can only be one winner. You should definitely check out their summer days deal, because 25% off across all packages is pretty awesome and you're not going to see that again for a while. So stock up on those credits now, and if you haven't used a Vodo yet, you need to start.

Speaker 1: 43:35

Consider this your personal invitation, because I want you to be efficient and I want you to keep more of your money and I want you to spend more time doing things that really matter in your life, like spending time with the people you love and enjoying life, and not sitting at your computer for hours and hours and hours. It's just not worth it. And remember what I said if you want to use tools like this but you say I can't because I can't afford it, you can start small. You don't have to buy a huge batch of credits just to start, but I'm telling you you are going to get hooked on this, like hooked. It's a super intuitive platform. It's easy to use. Do not be intimidated by this.

Speaker 1: 44:11

Okay, that was one of the reasons why I wanted to do a quick walkthrough. You can just dive in and figure it out, edit a couple of images. You're going to be sold, so now's the time to jump in. I'm excited to see what you do and again, remember you can get an extra entry into the giveaway If you post a before and after and talk about what you're doing with it. Just make sure you tag me and Avoto AI so that we can see it and record your entry. Okay, so you guys, have a great rest of your week. If you want to talk about any of this stuff, you know where to find me. I hope this was really valuable and insightful and that you learned something. And if you thought it was all of those things, share it with a friend and I will look for all of your giveaway entries over on Instagram. Have a great rest of your week. Love you, bye.