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 what all like users actually are saying. So let’s let’s ignore Justin and just talk to them. And, you know, at the end of the day, you can change your workflow to fit what we have now. You can keep using the workflow that you had before. We kind of try and leave it as open ended as possible, but really like get involved. I mean, use this program and say, hey, I don’t like this feature about it and we’ll change it. We’ll work towards building something that really fits. I mean, my biggest flag, I was so accustomed to being in Lightroom and then opening things in Photoshop, just command E in Photoshop. And I was like, it’s such an easy thing for us to be able to launch into retouching the same way. So that was my flag. I was like, no, I don’t want to have to click. I want to just keyboard shortcut. That mattered so much to me to be able to just hit command E and then automatically be in retouching. And everyone was like, no, you’re crazy. And then after a while, they’re like, oh, yeah, actually, you can skip Lightroom and Photoshop altogether easier by just having a keyboard shortcut to do it.
BEN: Yeah, I think this is one of those things that as like a as a photographer and now business owner, we’ve kind of patched together our workflow. Like, again, after being in this industry for 15 years doing this, like the systems and the processes over those 15 years that like I’ve I’ve kind of strong on them to work for me in a way. But if I were to actually look back at the whole process, there’s probably no, there’s not probably there’s 100 percent like a more streamlined way to do it. And I think what happens is like the pain of change has been it’s been greater than just like the pain of the little hiccups along the way, you know, and I’m like, I don’t want to change. I don’t want to change. But it feels like and I’m seeing this with A.I. across the board, like when I look at what cloud code can do and cloud cowork and and codecs and all these things, it feels like across the board. The the pain of change is is actually less in the first time in a long time than the pain of just kind of staying the same while everybody else is flying by, I am observing that the photographers that are willing to reexamine their systems and their processes, not just in editing, but in looking at other A.I. tools to help them in their business automations, systems, processes, agents, all that kind of stuff, the ones that are willing to say, OK, you know what, I’m going to suspend this. I’m going to get off my horse and I’m going to look at a different way to do things. They’re moving. They are moving so much faster. And and so I think that’s the encouragement maybe that I would have for photographers is this is one of those times in history that it may be worth the pain of change to reexamine, reexamine the systems and the processes and the workflows and the time. And man, that’s not sexy, is it, Justin?
JUSTIN: I am as stubborn as they can be. I refuse to put a plug in into Lightroom to upload to gallery. But now that aftershoots launching gallery or has launched gallery, I’m I’m in this position where I’m like, you know what, one click out saves me so much energy. I used to export the gallery, wait for it to go. And then at three o’clock in the morning or whatever, I’m uploading and sending it off and I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s just one click and it’s up there. But again, it’s because of the new system. It’s not a plug in into aftershoot to go to aftershoot gallery. It’s literally ingrained in it. So the button clicks and I can trust it. And before it was always like, oh, if shoot proof updates their plug in and there’s a bug, my images don’t go up. And then I look like an idiot because half the gallery is missing. But we’re not doing plugins with this. It’s literally just built into the software and it’ll flow and work. And I think that’s why it’s so important to change and look at these things and say, the amount of time we said at the beginning, you said 10 weddings, that’s like a full season. I would like not a chance I could do this without all of these new tools and all these things that are helping me actually get my work out the door faster.
BEN: Yeah. OK, so let’s I should probably pull back a little bit for somebody who hasn’t touched aftershoot yet, or maybe they touched it. They’ve worked inside of it six months ago. Like, what does the platform look like today versus back then, six months ago? Because I think a lot of us have we’ve maybe you tried it, you’ve experienced aftershoot a year ago or something. And so, like, just spell out what is the shift? What is transformed today that was not there yesterday?
JUSTIN: Yeah, I think the main points that exist now, you have we launched gallery. So you have literally a delivery platform. It is a website, but it’s connected directly to the program. And then you have this raw rendering feature. I mean, we’ve redesigned everything from head to toe. You’re going to find new buttons and new places and, you know, more simple like flows and ways to work about it. But literally, you can bring in your files directly into aftershoot. You can choose whether you want to call, whether you want to run a editing. If you want to just manually edit, you can do that, too, if you want. And then you can bring it straight to retouching and then send it right up to cloud to the gallery. So it’s all just in one linear flow. You know, if you’ve used it before, it’s not going to be a huge leap where you’re like, oh, no, where is everything? All the buttons. It still says call and edit and retouch up along the top. But you just have more features baked into every single piece of the software now. And you don’t have to do the dance of exporting out.
BEN: And then what was the I can’t remember the language. It was like restructure the re rebuild.
JUSTIN: Yeah. Rebuild previews and all that stuff. And then then left clicking on images and sending them back and forth. I mean, you know, it’s literally you have the freedom to batch as much as you want or individually work on images. And I’ll give you like the main example. I did. My daughter had her dance. My two daughters, they had their dance. I did photos of them and their friends right here with the white backdrop. And I just needed like 10 photos. So I ran the call, ran the edit. And while I dropped them off to the dance, I came back, opened them up and I just did my like little tweaks, like little fine tune exposure tweaks or whatever it may be, and opened each one up as I went and retouched them. I replaced the background like because it was just the bedsheet that was wrinkly. Like I just like made it look better. Right. And and got rid of pimples. They’re all like, you know, 13 and 14. So they’re pimply and all the things. So I just cleaned them up, made them look awesome, sent to the parents. They loved it. Right. So it was such a cool traditional workflow because that’s pretty much what I used to do before AI. But now I had AI powering the whole thing. Right. It used to be open them up in Lightroom, pick the ones I want by hand, edit them, bring them into Photoshop, run an action, clean up the skin, do all the things, replace the background and then send them back to send them back to Lightroom and export them. But I just did it all in one flow. But what’s really cool is that you can batch it, too. So for weddings, I’m running in, running my cull, running my edit. I’m reviewing the cull a little bit, like kind of cleaning it up, getting it really down to my final number, doing any tweaks I need to do as I’m doing that. And then I’m actually batch retouching. So I’m just opening the retouch tab and I’m clicking on a photo with everybody. Like I want old people, young people, male, female. I retouch each category individually. So like old people get like extra wrinkle removal and stuff. And then I sync it across the whole gallery and it’s done. Right. It just goes through and retouches everything. So again, it’s it’s a different flow because you can make it what you want. Like it’s weird to say, hey, I have one workflow for like personal stuff and another workflow for weddings and another workflow for sports. But that’s what I have because I have that freedom.
BEN: Yep. This is one of those things that I say it a lot. This is one of those things, don’t I? This is one of those things where it’s one of those things. So the the experience that I’ve had with a lot of photographers is I think there’s a belief that AI editing, especially the way that it was before, where it would call edit and then you bring it over to Lightroom, like they would open the gallery in Lightroom and everything would just be good to go. And then they have to go like back into retouching that back and forth process. It almost made it more painful when this is my experience, when I didn’t knock it out of the park perfectly. It was almost like more frustrating because it created this extra level of work of like, OK, so now I got to go over to Lightroom. I’ve got to then if I want to do retouching, I go back and then I go forth. And now with you being able to actually just make those little tweaks, those like fine-tuned adjustments right inside of Aftershoot, it just feels far, far less painless to expect, OK, we’re going to get 80 percent of the way there on the set. At least this is my kind of take, Justin, is I want I want AI to get me like 80 percent of the way there. I feel like as time keeps progressing, that percent keeps my expectation keeps going up, you know, like I’m looking forward to 99 percent of the way there, you know, I think I’m at like 80, 85 percent of the way. And then just being able to to stay
The post SFPP 310: Your Editing Workflow Just Changed Forever With Justin Benson appeared first on Six Figure Photography.
Portugal