When starting out on your professional photography journey, there is a lot of hit-and-trial involved with the tools and services available in the market.
It can be very time-consuming trying to find the tools that are a perfect fit for your workflow.
Software such as Adobe Lightroom Classic is a pretty obvious pick, as a good margin of photographers trusts Lightroom for editing their photos, but for other solutions, it can take a lot of research and effort for you to land on the perfect one.
It’s not just beginners; even some experienced photographers switch to another tool when they find it has better features, pricing, or simply less complexity than their current one.
We have noted down the best tools that are guaranteed to make your photography workflow more productive and faster by fitting in seamlessly.
The tools on this list are already helping thousands of photographers all around the world. You will feel more confident in taking on more projects, and with enough experience, you can raise your prices as well!
Let us take a look at the 7 best tools photographers need to add to their workflow and what magic they do:
- AI Culling Software: FilterPixel
- CRM: Honeybook
- Scheduling Meetings: Calendly
- AI Editing Software: Luminar Neo
- Only Gallery Sharing: Pic-time
- Website Management: Squarespace
- File Compressor: Rawsie
AI Culling Software: FilterPixel
Gone are the days of spending hours selecting your photos manually. FilterPixel is an AI Photo Culling software that culls your photos automatically for you.
Supporting both, cull-in and cull-out workflow, it is for every photographer who wants to select either through hundreds or thousands of photos and jump right into the editing process.
After coming from a shoot, you can easily drag and drop your gallery folder as one of your projects and choose a category depending on what type of shoot it was.
The AI will use various metrics depending on the shoot and will categorize your images into 3 categories-
- Accepted
- Rejected
- Unlabelled
This process takes a few minutes (you can still cull your images while it is happening!). It culls through 5000 images within roughly 20 minutes.
This magic happens through the cloud, so there is no system requirement from your PC.
- Selecting/ Rejecting images is super easy as the loading speed of images is instantaneous and you don’t have to even zoom in/out because of the Face views.
- The Auto-select button is a huge time-saver for photographers who have a lot of similar images, as clicking it will select the best images out of their duplicates automatically.
- If you are not happy with the selection you can go to their comparison mode and check duplicate images side by side.
- The AI sliders will help you find the sharpest image out of all your images with a single drag.
- After you are satisfied with all your selections, you can export your photos directly to Lightroom, making your photography workflow more streamlined.
FilterPixel is cutting hours for wedding photographers worldwide and helping them give the best experience for their clients!
Pricing: The basic plan starts at $9.99 per month
Free trial available for 14 days!
CRM: Honeybook
Honeybook is a CRM tool that helps photographers manage all their administrative tasks smoothly while giving customizable options for your brand.
- Find different templates of proposals to send to your clients. Schedule and book meetings with them without any hassle.
- Manage and verify your contracts easily and get notified once the client signs.
- Honeybook also offers invoices so you can track client journeys and make the process seamless for everyone.
- Save time and increase your productivity by automating email reminders to your client within Honeybook.
- There are also a ton of integrations available that you can take advantage of to make your photography workflow even smoother such as Zoom, Gmail, Google calendar, etc.
Honeybook is also available on Playstore and Apple app store.
Pricing: The starter plan costs $9/ Month
Free 7-day trial available.
Scheduling Meetings: Calendly
While collecting and managing leads is important, scheduling meetings with them for consultation in an easy manner (where they are offered to book a slot of your day in advance) is also important.
Calendy offers the same service, where clients can book a 1-hour or 30-minute slot of their day for calls, meetings, and shoots as well using your Calendly link.
A lot of professional photographers use Calendly as part of their photography workflow.
- If you ever had to cancel or reschedule a booked slot, the process to do so is also very simple and both, you and your clients, will be notified of the change, making the process smooth and transparent.
- Calendly also syncs easily with google calendar so it is easy for you to plan out your day and have a healthy work-life balance.
Pricing: Basics are covered in the free plan but for more automation features, the basic plan starts at $8 /month
Editing Software: Luminar Neo
Luminar Neo is an easy AI photo editing software (and Lightroom Plugin) for Mac and PC. Created by Skylum it offers a variety of AI enhancement tools that Lightroom is missing.
Photographers can make good use of these AI tools to enhance color, fix blurry issues, change lighting conditions, and a lot more in their images instantly.
The software is easy to use even if you are a beginner, and also provides fixes if you want something in your image quickly changed as a professional.
- The AI is super helpful in detecting subjects and editing certain parts of the photo. For example, retouching the skin and editing facial features such as eyes, nose, and lips in portraits.
- Relight the darkened images with RelightAI which calculates the depth of a photo and creates a precise depth map to spread the light spatially across a 2D image.
- Enhance the sky, bokeh, composition, contrast, and color of a photo easily with Luminar Neo.
Luminar Neo also provides a bunch of awesome extensions that you can use for different purposes such as:
- Supersharp AI can help you tackle motion blur and misfocus in your photos.
- Upscale AI can help you enhance image resolution without losing quality.
- Noiseless AI can help you reduce noise in your photos.
- and many more!
Pricing: Luminar Neo costs 79$ (often Discounted) and is a one-time purchase.
Only Gallery Sharing: Pic-time
Pic-time is a stunning online gallery-sharing tool made for photographers that want high-quality galleries in one place to deliver photos to their clients, sell prints or simply have them as a public portfolio.
- You can easily share photo albums with your clients for proofing, sharing, and downloading.
- The clients can also share the gallery securely with others.
- You also have the option to create a slideshow of photos and add music to create a more beautiful experience for your clients.
- Both you and your clients can create gallery albums and your clients can order the prints from pic-time print stores that they have partnered with from all around the world.
- Public portfolios are easy to make and very customizable. They can be easily integrated into your website without any coding knowledge making the photography workflow smooth and efficient for you.
- Pic-time also allows you to display and sell your artwork using your vision. Add music, text, or your own voice to create a virtual experience for people interested in buying prints.
- For generating sales, you can use a variety of automated features such as customized emails, reminders, and discount banners.
Pricing: 17$/ Month
Free 30-day trial available
Website Management: Squarespace
Squarespace is a website management tool for photographers to easily share their work, tell their stories and generate leads with a lot of customizable options. Select from hundreds of website templates for designs that match your style.
- Managing your website according to your style and liking is super easy. Moreover, Squarespace fits really well with photographers’ workflows.
- The user can also pair their site with Pic-time in real-time to showcase their portfolio as it grows.
- Get all the optimizable resources required for SEO to rank easily and have good visibility.
Pricing: 14$/ month for annual packages
Free 14-day trial available!
File Compressor: Rawsie
Rawsie is an amazing tool for photographers who want to save their money in storage.
If you are a photographer who likes to keep RAW files around for a few years before finally disposing of them, the cost of storage can be very high.
RAW files are large image sizes that contain all the image data, hence they are very heavy in size and could easily fill up your storage after a couple of shots.
This increases your storage costs as you will need more hard drives or larger cloud storage plans for the RAW files.
Rawsie helps in compressing such RAW files by compressing their size up to 80%.
Rawsie uses an algorithm that converts all your RAW files to DNG without losing image data and hence they can be edited without any loss in quality. This makes it perfect for photographers who want to preserve the RAW data at a marginally smaller size before finally getting rid of them.
After editing your RAWs you can create a backup of all the files in a compressed DNG format with Rawsie as part of your photography workflow.
Note: Rawsie is currently available only on Mac but there is a waiting list available for windows users.
Pricing: 80$/ year
30 photos per day free compression
Conclusion
The photography industry is very competitive and continuously evolving. As a professional photographer, you got to stay updated with the current trends. Just as mirrorless cameras took over the DSLR, these smart tools are taking over old ones.
Many of these tools use AI or complex algorithms to help make your photography workflow more efficient. They are designed to increase productivity and fit smoothly into your workflow, so I don’t see a good reason to go back to the old manual ways.
If you liked this blog, make sure to check out our blogs on family photography!
