Culling With Imagen Is Like Having Your Own Personal AI Editor

Apr 08, 2025

Kate Garibaldi

A woman with long, curly hair poses dramatically. She wears a red strappy top and has red lipstick. Her hands are gently framing her face. The background is dark, emphasizing her features.

Imagen, the innovative post-processing app, has now added a smart artificial intelligence culling feature to save photographers precious time.

Full disclosure: This article is brought to you by Imagen.

Imagen is an app that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to pair with Lightroom or Photoshop to speed up your post-processing workflow. The AI in the Imagen app will review your images, cull the undesirable ones, and apply custom edits to them. I tested the program with the widely used post-processing software Lightroom for this review.

Intro To Imagen: Your AI Editing Assistant

The first time that you open the Imagen app, it has three panels on the side: Home, AI Profiles, and Projects. From the Home screen, you can click to view all of the Talent AI Profiles that come with the software.

Screenshot of the Lightroom Classic start page showing options to create or choose a catalog. The screen is primarily dark with buttons for creating a new catalog and dragging and dropping files.

A dark-themed user interface with a popup window offering two profile options: "Lite Personal AI Profile" with a lightning bolt icon, and "Personal AI Profile" with a puzzle piece icon, marked as recommended. Buttons for "My Profiles" and "Profile Showcase" are visible.

Screenshot of a photo editing software interface for creating a new project. Options include naming the project, choosing a profile, photography type, and tools like crop, retouching, sharpening, and resizing. A plus icon suggests adding files.

The profile showcase includes ready-made AI Profiles by leading photographers, including Sarah Edmunds, Fer Juaristi, John Branch IV, and more. These Talent AI Profiles can be compared and tweaked to apply them to your images. Imagen shared that additional profiles are also available for purchase in its new Profile Shop.

Top photographers, including Beba Vowels, Jackie Siggard, Jay Boatwright, and preset creators like Archipelago Presets, have created pro-quality presets for the Profile Shop. Photographers can test each of the available profiles with their own RAW photos before purchasing them to see if they’re the right fit. Of course, photographers are also encouraged to find their unique voice by using Imagen’s Profile Adjustments feature to dial in a bespoke look.

Screenshot of a photo editing software interface. The screen displays various image profiles and presets, each with a thumbnail and options like "Continue Edit." The background is dark, with navigation and menu options at the top.

However, the real magic is that you can create your own profile using AI to learn your specific style. This is where the Imagen app shines.

Under the My Profiles section, you can train the artificial intelligence on your own files. There are two choices: a personal Lite AI Profile if you want to get started quickly or a more in-depth Personal AI Profile that will analyze approximately 3,000 photos to fine-tune the assistant to match your editing style.

Users can create and train multiple AI Profiles. This is especially helpful if you use different approaches for different genres of photography. The software will also look at whether or not you photograph in color or black and white to really hone in on how your final product should look. Imagen shared a few tips for maximizing your catalog of custom AI Profiles.

Imagen recommends that photographers train each profile using diverse photos, including images with varied lighting. The most important consideration is using images with a consistent editing style, as this will deliver the best results.

Furthermore, all of the AI profiles, whether the ones you trained, or the included presets are fully customizable for 100% control over your final edits.

Analyzing your photos to train the AI can be done with a Lightroom, Photoshop, or Bridge catalog or file folders. In exploring the software I also saw that there’s an interest-form to sign up for updates on when other software such as Capture One will be added as additional options.

Training the AI will allow it to look at whatever genre of photography you do from wedding and events to nature or commercial, analyzing the images for common style points that it will then apply to similar future images. Unlike a standard preset, training the AI will look at how you post-process for the most fine-tuned automated experience. Imagen shared that the AI looks over your all of your adjustments to create a profile that truly matches how you edit.

In contrast to a typical preset, a trained Imagen AI Profile will dynamically react to each specific photo, ensuring a consistent look and feel no matter the subject.

Training the AI is very straightforward, with the software walking you through each step.

AI-Powered Culling

An exciting new feature in the Imagen app is the new AI-Powered culling. This is a game changer for photographers who do high-volume or frequent photo shoots. The culling feature can be applied to catalogs or photos uploaded, to select the very best for you. If you’ve ever had to slog through thousands of photographs from a photo shoot, or if you’re just a photographer with a backlog of images from several smaller photo shoots, this feature is a breath of fresh air.

Another exciting aspect is that you can pair the culling feature with the application of an AI profile, whether your own custom profile or one of the included Talent Profiles. Imagen’s software allows the ability to cull based on the photographs final product if edited, rather than deciding when the image is in its raw form. With AI-Powered culling, you can see the images either as original or with the edit applied to the previews so that you can decide whether to apply the cull. This ability to preview culls edited before deciding to pass on them is notable, and can be a game changer for many photographers.

There are several preferences for culling to create the best workflow for you. Culling markers for Lightroom can be done by color labels, stars, or flags. I chose to instruct the Imagen software to apply a star system with the highest stars to indicate the very best photos, which it calls keepers.

Once the culling preferences are set the first time, the app will remember it for next time, however you can always change these settings as well.

Imagen’s culling feature also uses the same shortcuts as Lightroom for an intuitive navigational experience.

The culling itself is very sophisticated. The AI software will look at commonly undesirable effects such as unintentional blur, accidental captures, improper exposure reading those images lower. Importantly, the AI does know to identify photos that are purposefully blurred. It’s so intelligent that it will also look at which images are similar and keep at least one, selecting the best, of each grouping. This way, at least one photo from every scenario will be highlighted for you.

I chose a Lightroom catalog with 668 photos, and the software took about 25 minutes to cull and edit the good photos while creating groups for similar images, selecting the best of the bunch. It is easy to see how such a tedious but required part of post-processing can be accomplished with AI, saving precious time and energy.

A photo editing software interface showing a before-and-after comparison of a portrait. The subject is a woman in a blue dress against an orange background. Editing tools and adjustments are visible on the right panel, with image thumbnails below.

Screenshot of an Imagor project management interface with a pop-up. The pop-up features options to "Cull," for selecting and culling photos, and "Edit," for further photo editing. The background lists projects labeled "World Pack Travel 42" and "TeachPortrait Catalog.

A computer screen displaying a culling project interface for organizing event photos. It shows various photo sorting options and previews. The screen is primarily black with white text and has clickable buttons for different features.

A split-screen image shows a woman posing with her hands near her face in a photo editing software. The left side is the unedited "Before" picture, and the right side is the edited "After" version. The interface displays various adjustment options.

Powerful Cloud Based Editing

One aspect to note though, in analyzing user photos, culling to select the very best images, and automatically applying custom edits to each one the Imagen app carries a heavy burden. With so many tasks completed all at once, it takes a bit of time to complete all of these tasks. This is time that you can spend on other important tasks while your AI assistant in Imagen does all the grunt work for you. I let the software run in the background while I completed other tasks. It can even be set up to email you once it is done.

Imagen is cloud based. With just an internet connection, users can access the apps powerful features regardless of their computers specs, speed or strength.

In addition to accessing powerful cloud based computing for your edits, Imagen’s cloud based services also include storage. The Imagen app utilizes smart compression that promises to reduce the size of your RAW photos by up to 75% without sacrificing photo quality or resolution. With your files stored in the cloud, they are accessible from anywhere, on multiple devices, as long as you have reliable internet service.

An email notification from Imagen stating that 668 photos from "March 2025 Portrait Test" have been edited using the Vivid Light AI profile by Scott Johnson. It mentions saving 5.34 hours of editing time and includes next steps for downloading.

Edit-to-Delivery Partnership With Pic-Time

Ever the time saver, Imagen is an all-in-one solution and can also be used to deliver your gallery straight to the client. As Imagen shared in a recent blog post, it has partnered with Pic-Time for a connection that offers an end-to-end workflow solution.

Imagen’s Edit-to-Delivery feature turns AI-edited photos into ready-to-share files instantly, whether to a Pic-Time gallery to share with clients or as an exported JPEG.

Pic-Time promises to significantly streamline a professional workflow and help photographers deliver edited files to clients faster than ever.

This is especially valuable when trying to get polished, easy-to-navigate photo galleries to clients as fast as possible.

The Pic-Time integration saves photographers significant time without sacrificing quality. Time is money, and for high-volume photographers, Imagen and Pic-Time can be a game changer.

Pricing and Availability

To add this powerful, time saving software to your post-processing workflow, Imagen offers $0.05 per photo pay-as-you-go or annual plans starting at $68 per month to suit your needs.

Culling and cloud storage features are both separate add-ons for Imagen subscribers. Unlimited AI-powered culling services are $18 per month, or $12 per month with an annual subscription. Cloud storage starts at $3 per month for 500 GB to securely store up to approx 50,000 photos, with the option to upgrade to a 2 TB or custom plan.

Full disclosure: This article is brought to you by Imagen.