Part 5 of 5, I hope to answer that question and examine why
In the days photoshop came out, the result was a weeding out the entire creative industry. The ad agencies decided they no longer needed retouchers, experienced photographers or the experienced art directors and creative directors. Since we have this great new tool, and we can get the kids out of college to use it and save money and time. So new art directors were hired, they hired their photographer friends out of college who had no studio or life experience behind a studio camera. And agencies started the in-house studio.
After a year or so, the agencies but more so the clients realized the time and cost for retouching and photography went up 3 times than before. The wave of fresh out of college photographers had problems understanding the real ins and outs of lighting and solving on set problems fast. If they couldn’t do something easy as an experience studio photographer could , example create a specific highlight or get rid of a nasty shadow, the AD and young photographer would just say something like….Oh, we can fix that in Photoshop, so no big deal. Bang! Something that could be remedied very quick by a seasoned pro ended up cost 1000s in post.
The bean counters in the agencies saw photoshop retouching time go through the roof and unhappy clients with unsatisfactory photography and sky-high digital retouching cost. After that what quickly happen the experienced art directors and creative directors were asked to come back by the agencies. They did but not until a nice raise was given to them. The Agencies hired back the experience photographer who at this point were already leading the industry in using photoshop along with the decades of behind the camera and photographic lighting skills.
So will AI replace the photographer, I doubt it, but what does happen is either you use AI as just another tool like photoshop or uploading your own photos and improving upon them or getting variations of the original.
The only thing you can do is get with it and figure out how you can use it for your clients and your portfolio work.
BRAIN POWER
Capturing an image can be an exciting, thrilling, brain expanding problem-solving experience. The brain work that can go into the set and the blending of art direction and photographic skills that come together to get the image you are both after, putting your heart and soul into it will always be better than typing hour upon hours of words making a computer understand what you want. And probably having to be just satisfied with what you got but not overly ecstatic unless you can accept what pops out of AI is mostly of what you did not create but zillions of other artist and photographers did and AI is just spinning those colors.
