Photography Predictions for 2023 | AI, ChatGPT, Inflation & More

today I want to talk about my predictions for 2023 in the photography industry I'm going to touch on AI I'm going to touch on what I think are going to be some massive Market hits inflation and Camera Manufacturing [Music] hey everybody Welcome to Studio Builder I'm Kevin Patrick Robbins it's 2023. I have some predictions for this year so I want to cover them the first big thing I think uh AI is going to be massive this year it started out last year but I think I have some opinions about AI image generators that are different from I think a lot of photographers and chat GPT which is something that I've been using on uh pretty much a daily basis to help with my photography business now and other things that have to do with AI and how I'm currently using and have been using AI in my business for about a year now the first thing I want to touch on are plugins maybe you've been using AI for a while now as well and didn't even know it if you use photoshop's neural filters those are AI filters I use three filters from a company called retouch for me I saw these uh demonstrated on the pixm perfect Channel and I was like I was blown away I went and got them and I've been using them for at least a year year now I think they have been a game changer for me in my business and my retouching and and the quality of my images and the amount of time that I have saved those plugins are hands down the best investment I made in my business uh last year what I also had the ability to experiment and play with last year because I had a couple of weddings to finish out were a other couple of uh other AI tools one was after shoot which is uses artificial intelligence to detect uh blurry photos closed eyes and do a lot of your image calling for you so if you're shooting a wedding and you end up like and you have a second shooter and you end up with like thousands of images you can use after shoot to give you a good basic color rating call off the top and then you can start pairing down from there also Imagine AI uh which spelled the image Jen and I I in my head and I still say Imogen but it's a pronounced imagine AI I only figured that out after watching a couple of their YouTube videos they have a process by which like once you are done you're calling and and you've figured out the images that you want to use you can pick a profile from another photographer another uh like wedding photographer for example or you can use uh Lightroom catalogs of your images to train the AI with your editing style and build your own profile so that you can edit subsequent catalogs and such as weddings or portrait sessions in your specific style and I think that's phenomenal the only thing I don't like about it is that I don't use Lightroom I use capture one I haven't used Lightroom in about eight years and so I had to go back in this year when processing a wedding and and Tinker with like figuring out how to use Lightroom again I would like to see tools like that developed for capture one Speaking of which capture one has a new tool I did a video about it I'll link to that up here the smart adjustments tool uses facial recognition to make smart adjustments and I'm pretty sure that is based on machine learning and there's an artificial intelligence engine built into that to do that so we're going to see AI in our workflow process in many many ways what you may have been seeing is a mid-journey images coming out of mid-journey stable diffusion Dolly and I've tinkered around with those a little bit and I think where that could be useful for you in your business is if you're developing concepts for mood boards and you actually want to be able to develop a a specific concept for a shoot you can use prompts to create those images in mid-journey to say this is what I'm going for this is the image that we're going to try and create in the real world so you you can use mid-journey not just to create backgrounds or textures or things like that or to create images that you could use a digital art but you could use it to create images that are specifically going to be used as reference images for your mood board you can use that to build a mood board for a shoot in millinote or in your gallery software however you want to do it Miller notes a great way to build mood boards it's one of the best ways and I have a link down to that in the description if you want to check out melanote it's phenomenal I think what we'll also see when it comes to image generators are websites starting to integrate with image generators as well for example Squarespace if you drop an image for a background or just put an image in it can connect to unsplash which gives you free stock photography but you can also like then put in Getty Images directly in Squarespace as well but you might start seeing being able to like add a prompt and generate images and generate stock images right in your Squarespace website I think that's something that we're going to see this year if any industry is going to get hit by image generation it's going to be stock photography as long as you know right now it uh AI is not doing so well with hands so as long as the hands aren't in the photo images look uh pretty great and we might see that put to use for stock Photography in in ads in images that are generic that don't need to have like the product or sell a specific brand or have the brand identity then look and feel involved in the shoot I think for commercial shoots I don't think AI is going to be touching that anytime soon because you definitely need to have everything very specific and meticulous when you're doing a commercial shoot now the other ai2 tool that I use right now is chat GPT you've probably heard about it it's grown very quickly massive user base and it is a chatbot that that has access to a ton of information the current version has I think it's a 10 billion connections like neural connections and gpt4 which is coming out later this year I think in a few months has a hundred trillion connections so it's literally I think a thousand or ten thousand times uh bigger the language model in the next version and from early reports it's blowing people away it's like chat GPT is blowing people away and this version is blowing it out of the water what you can use chat gbt4 some people are using it to like write blog posts that's probably not a good idea what it would be good for is if you wanted to write an outline for a blog post and then you go in and write in and fill in the blanks or if you wanted to create a sales page for a special shoot that you're doing maybe a Valentine's Day shoot or a Mother's Day shoot you could go into chat GPT and you could say what are the top 10 copywriting formats for promoting an offer on a website it might give you a list of of story brand and pastor and Ada and then you could say Okay create an outline for a Mother's Day portrait special using the Ada copywriting formula and then it'll give you an outline and then you have like an outline for your web page to structure that page and to promote the offer that you want to do and these are very good very tried and true copyright sales methodologies that people use on their websites all the time even if you don't know anything about doing sales or promotions you can ask it to like help you that's where I think chat GPT is is really strong is I use it almost as like a research assistant in my business you can research project ideas if you want to do a personal project and you want to focus on extraordinary jobs you might say give me a list of like um extraordinary jobs that require a lot of skill and talent or something and then it might give you a list and then you can pick one of those and you could say give me a list of items that someone in this position might interact with on a regular basis what they might wear Etc and then it will give you a list so you might know how to then put together props for the shoot wardrobe for the shoot and you could even ask it for location settings where this might take place and you could either build a set or you could find a set or a location to shoot on and just use it as a as a research assistant so you're not necessarily searching Google you are using chat GPT to help you develop and outline your shoot we know Microsoft is going to be integrating chat GPT with their Bing search service very soon and Google has issued a code red a company-wide code red about this and they are worried and they are scared so what you're definitely going to have to watch out for every photographer is going to have to watch out for this year is how the integration of AI into search results is going to affect your search engine optimization so you're going to have to stay on top of that I'm going to have to stay on top of that what I find out I will help deliver to you as well we're gonna we're gonna have to adjust there's there's no if ands or buts about it we are going to have to adjust to figuring out how this is going to change our our marketing and our promotions and what we do in our websites the other thing that we're going to have to deal with this year is inflation inflation's going crazy cost of everything is going up it's making it harder for people to pay for services but it's also making it more difficult for us to make living we may have to make price adjustments that may make it more difficult for people to hire us in the short run so I think we're going to see a dramatic Dropout of the middle which has been coming for a while the the higher end of the market where people have a lot of money and and they're not worried about paying if you're a commercial photographer we're talking about ad agencies and not you know small mom-and-pop businesses with portrait photography a lot of people who are bottom level photographers in terms of pricing I think we're going to see a lot of them shut down their businesses because inflation is going to be too high and they're not going to be able to run a business on low rates so I think we're going to see a lot of photographers go out of business this year due to inflation and the rising costs of of running a business and you know just maintaining a lifestyle it's getting a lot more expensive and if you can't bring in the money that you need to to live to pay rent to buy food to pay for gas then those people are going to realize that what they're doing and and hopefully that's not you what they're doing is not sustainable and so they will leave the market and have to go get nine to fives which may be better for those of us who remain because there will be fewer of us in the market also due to inflation if you're a wedding photographer I think we're going to see much more scaled down weddings or fewer weddings it is a known statistic you can look it up on Google that as we go into recessions fewer people get married fewer people couple up and actually have weddings so I think we're going to see maybe not a decrease this year because these weddings are booked but booking into 2024 2025 is going to be it's going to take a hit as well so be prepared for that and the last thing I wanted to talk about today and I think we've seen it coming for a while is I think DSLR cameras SLR cameras are going to uh the final nail on their coffin is going to happen this year I think every camera manufacturer is going to go to mirrorless exclusively and we are going to see the end of SLR cameras I held out for a long time I was using uh Canon 6D for years before that a 60D I've had this R6 for two years now and it has been a game changer for me it's been absolutely phenomenal and I would never go back to an SLR camera after using a mirrorless so that's it for this video let me know in the comments what you think are going to be the big predictions that are going to happen this year in 2023 and we will revisit this uh next year with new predictions and see how well I fared on these alright thanks for watching