Known for its wide range of highly rated single-feature utilities, SoftOrbits, led by its CEO Eugene Ustinenkov, has found a way to appeal to both professional photographers and businesses by offering a unique take on AI-powered tools.
Over the last few months, the company managed to increase its active user base by implementing AI features into its well-established solutions, all without negative feedback, which is usually predominant in these scenarios.
Considering that so many expert photographers find generative AI tools problematic from an ethical standpoint and the fact that the debate around these tools is at its peak, this achievement shows that there are ways to create AI-powered tools that can please both sides.
SoftOrbits made a bet on AI’s non-generative capabilities, largely ignoring its potential for image creation and instead focusing on its ability to recognize natural language and perform tasks by understanding prompts. The company chose to use AI to help photographers save time on routine, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks like fixing lighting and removing backgrounds, enabling professionals to focus on the creative parts of their work.
“We see how professionals respond to this approach — there is no backlash to our update despite us clearly choosing to implement AI, which is generally a highly controversial thing in the niche. As it turns out, as soon as you make it clear that your goal is to make the photographer’s life easier and not to take away their job or replace their artistic expression with something generated by a machine, the response is entirely different,” says Eugene Ustinenkov, CEO of SoftOrbits and AlarmFront.
At the same time, Ustinenkov notes, businesses still feel that they benefit from the tools since they significantly improve productivity and enable photographers to finish tasks way faster — according to the team’s internal data, AI features can speed up editing by up to 40%.
“Once we show just how much more convenient and quick our solutions are in comparison to traditional manual editing methods, tools basically sell themselves. We are convinced that this is the future for marketing teams, where time matters most. While some experts might still prefer to edit every part of their photograph manually, most companies will definitely benefit from what we have to offer, and the fact that this doesn’t threaten their employees or make them feel uneasy in any way is a major bonus that also helps us promote the tools even better,” says Eugene Ustinenkov, CEO of SoftOrbits, Candidate of Technical Sciences.
SoftOrbits intends to add new AI features to most of its existing software, upgrading well-established solutions with new functionalities and breathing a second life into some of the classic utilities. The company hopes that more businesses in the industry will follow its example instead of focusing only on generative tools that are still not capable of producing images that would be on par with what experts can do.
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