A Sonoma County Wedding Photographer’s Honest Take on AI, Editing, and the Real Questions to Ask Before You Hire
The short answer? Yes. We are. But that’s nothing new. The real question is HOW.
I get this question a lot lately, especially from couples deep in the trenches of vetting Sonoma County wedding photographers. It’s a fair thing to wonder about. AI is everywhere right now, and nobody wants to drop five figures on their wedding day only to find out their photos got run through a slot machine. So let’s talk about it.
Quick disclaimer before we go any further: This post is about how I run my business as a Sonoma County wedding photographer. Other photographers will absolutely do things differently, and that doesn’t make them wrong. There’s no single “correct” way to use these tools. What matters is that whoever you hire is upfront about their process and that their process produces work you love.
(Also, how funny is this picture of Holly and me? I had to find a reason to use it. Photo by Katie Monroe Photography at Bright Studio).
AI Has Been in Your Photographer’s Editing Software For Decades
This part might surprise you: AI in photo editing isn’t some shiny 2024 invention. It’s been quietly riding shotgun in our software since before most of us could legally drink.
Adobe Photoshop introduced Content-Aware Fill back in 2010, that’s the tool that magically removes a stranger from the background of your photo. It uses machine learning to predict and fill in what should be there. That was over fifteen years ago. Lightroom, the program most wedding photographers actually live in, has been using AI-powered features for image searching, keywording, and auto-tagging since at least 2017.
Most of us consider the everyday automations to be AI too, things like:
- Copy-paste settings across thousands of images (a Lightroom staple forever)
- Auto white balance and auto-tone
- Lens profile corrections that fix distortion automatically
- Noise reduction
- Face detection for organizing galleries
Every single one of those is some flavor of automation or machine learning. They’ve been part of our workflow for over a decade. Nobody clutched their pearls when we started using auto-tone in 2012, and nobody should be losing sleep over it now.
The newer stuff like, Generative Remove, AI masking, AI denoise, assisted culling, are just the latest chapter of a very long book.
How I Use AI in My Wedding Photography Workflow (And Where I Don’t)
Here’s exactly where AI shows up in my process and just as importantly, where it doesn’t. Again, this is my workflow as a Sonoma County wedding photographer. Other photographers will run things differently, and that’s fine. But this is how I do things.
Where I use it:
I’ve spent years developing my own presets. They’re built from thousands of hours of color work, tested across every kind of light Sonoma County throws at us, golden hour at a Healdsburg vineyard, harsh noon sun in a Petaluma backyard, dim string-lights at a barn reception. That preset is my style. It’s mine.
Applying that preset across a wedding gallery? Yeah, I use the software’s automation to do that. Because the alternative is sitting at my computer wiggling sliders for forty hours per wedding while my clients wait six months to see their photos.
But, and this is important, I don’t trust the automation to be correct. I use it as a tool to get me to consistency, then I go back through every single image in the gallery and make additional tweaks by hand. Light shifts a hundred times during a wedding day. A preset can’t read the room but, I can.
Where I don’t use it:
I don’t use AI to cull my wedding galleries.
Culling is the part of the process where a photographer goes through every single frame and selects which ones make it into your final gallery. There are AI tools out there that promise to do this for you, and I’m not into that.
I look at every image with my own eyes and choose the best compositions and the best moments, not what some algorithm decides is “a good photo.” An AI doesn’t know that the slightly out-of-focus shot of your grandma laughing is the one that’s going to make you cry in ten years. It doesn’t know which split-second glance between you and your partner is the glance.
Beyond that, culling your own images is how you grow as a photographer. Sitting with your own work and being honest about what landed and what didn’t, that’s how you understand your mistakes, recognize your successes, and get better. If I outsource that to a robot, I stop improving. Hard pass.
Also, your photos are precious to me! Yeah, I’m a total freak for going back through the day, frame by frame, watching the story unfold from the first detail shot to the last sparkler exit, that’s genuinely one of my favorite parts of being a Sonoma County wedding photographer. I’m not handing that off to an algorithm.
And what I never do:
- Replace your eye for moments with the software’s eye
- Generate fake images of things that didn’t happen
- Pretend I was somewhere I wasn’t
- Use generative AI to invent people, faces, or details
The generative AI tools still aren’t replacing the experienced human anyway. I once tried to remove someone’s ex from a group photo using Photoshop’s Generative Fill and it confidently put a giant wasp there instead. A whole wasp (that was not very realistic either). Where the ex used to be. So no, the robots are not coming for our jobs just yet.
The Real Questions To Ask When Hiring a Wedding Photographer
If you’re researching photographers right now, here’s what actually matters way more than whether AI touched a slider somewhere:
- Do you love their work across full galleries (not just the highlight reel on Instagram)?
- Do they have backup gear and a backup plan if something fails on the day?
- Have they shot at your venue, do they scout new ones?
- What’s their style of working, directing every pose, or documenting what’s actually happening?
- What’s the timeline for getting your photos back?
- Do you actually like them as a human being? You’ll be spending more one-on-one time with your photographer on your wedding day than almost anyone else, including your partner.
- Do they cull their own galleries, or hand it off to AI?
- Do they handle generative AI ethically, no fake faces, no replacing people, no inventing moments that didn’t happen?
Those last two are where the AI question actually matters. Not “did automation touch my photos.” But “are you the one choosing my photos, and are you generating things that weren’t there?”
Stop Valuing Your Photos By How Long Editing Took
I see this a lot online: “I spend forty hours editing each wedding!”
It’s a great line. It sounds impressive. But do you really value our work based on how long we sat at a desk afterward?
I have never heard a couple say:
“The photos are stunning, the experience was incredible, our families adored her, she captured every moment we wanted and a hundred we didn’t know we needed… BUT she used some automated processes on the backend. So I’m gonna pass on recommending her.”
Never happens, nobody cares.
What people do care about is whether the photos feel like their actual day. Whether the photographer was a calming presence or a stressful one. Whether they got the messy, emotional, real-life moments. Whether the gallery makes them cry in a good way ten years from now.
You can’t polish a turd. If a photographer gets it wrong in-camera, no AI is going to save them. The whole game is taking a great photo first. Then the automations on the backend are just speeding up the most boring parts so we can get back to you, answering your timeline questions, planning the family photo list, scouting your venue, investing in continuing education, and showing up on your wedding day rested instead of running on three hours of sleep because we stayed up till 3am tweaking color balance on photo 412 of 1,200.
What This Means For You
When you’re hiring a Sonoma County wedding photographer, ask the questions that actually matter. Look at full galleries. Meet them. Trust your gut. Ask how they handle the wedding day, how they communicate, what their backup plans are. Ask whether they cull their own work or hand it to AI. Ask how they feel about generative tools.
And if AI comes up? Now you know every photographer worth their salt has been using some version of it for years. The ones who use it thoughtfully are giving you better photos and a better experience. The ones who outsource the soul of the job to an algorithm, that’s a real concern, and you should ask.
But please don’t pass on a photographer you love because they admitted to using AI-assisted denoise on your reception photos. That’s like refusing to hire a chef because they use a stand mixer instead of whisking by hand.
Let’s Make Real Photos of Your Real Day
I’m a documentary wedding photographer based in Petaluma, shooting weddings all over Sonoma County, Napa, and the greater Bay Area. I cull every gallery by hand, edit every image with my own eyes, and capture what actually happens, the belly laughs, the side-eyes, the windblown veil, the grandma crying during the toast. No fake setups. No reposed moments. No AI-generated faces.
Just real photos of real people having a really good day.
