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How to Use AI for Photography and Image Editing
Use AI to enhance photos, remove backgrounds, upscale images, restore old photos, generate product shots, and create stunning visuals without professional photography skills.
9 min read27 February 2026
AI tools like Adobe Firefly and Canva AI remove backgrounds, enhance lighting, and fix exposure in seconds without any Photoshop knowledge required
Upscale low-resolution images to print quality using AI, breathing new life into old photos, screenshots, and smartphone images
AI restores damaged and faded old photographs, colourises black-and-white images, and can even reconstruct missing parts of torn or water-damaged prints
Generate professional product photography, lifestyle shots, and marketing visuals using AI image generators like Midjourney and DALL-E without a camera or studio
Why This Matters
Visual content drives engagement across every platform and industry. Whether you are an e-commerce seller needing product photos, a social media creator building your brand, a real estate agent showcasing properties, or a family wanting to preserve precious memories, the quality of your images matters enormously.
Traditionally, professional image editing required expensive software like Adobe Photoshop and years of training. Professional photography needed costly equipment and studio time. This put high-quality visual content out of reach for many individuals and small businesses, particularly across Asia where budgets are often tight.
AI has completely democratised image editing and creation. Tasks that took a skilled editor 30 minutes, such as removing a background, enhancing a portrait, or colour-correcting a batch of photos, now take seconds with AI tools. More impressively, AI can now generate entirely new images from text descriptions, create product shots without physical photography, and restore decades-old family photographs that were previously considered beyond saving.
For businesses and creators across Asia, this means professional-quality visuals are now accessible to everyone regardless of budget or technical skill. A street food vendor in Bangkok can create Instagram-worthy product photos. A startup in Jakarta can produce marketing visuals that rival multinational campaigns. A family in Manila can restore and preserve grandparents' photographs from decades past.
Traditionally, professional image editing required expensive software like Adobe Photoshop and years of training. Professional photography needed costly equipment and studio time. This put high-quality visual content out of reach for many individuals and small businesses, particularly across Asia where budgets are often tight.
AI has completely democratised image editing and creation. Tasks that took a skilled editor 30 minutes, such as removing a background, enhancing a portrait, or colour-correcting a batch of photos, now take seconds with AI tools. More impressively, AI can now generate entirely new images from text descriptions, create product shots without physical photography, and restore decades-old family photographs that were previously considered beyond saving.
For businesses and creators across Asia, this means professional-quality visuals are now accessible to everyone regardless of budget or technical skill. A street food vendor in Bangkok can create Instagram-worthy product photos. A startup in Jakarta can produce marketing visuals that rival multinational campaigns. A family in Manila can restore and preserve grandparents' photographs from decades past.
How to Do It
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Step 1: Remove and Replace Backgrounds Instantly
Upload any photo to remove.bg, Canva, or Adobe Express and AI removes the background in seconds. This works brilliantly for product photography (place items on clean white backgrounds for marketplace listings), professional headshots (swap messy backgrounds for clean office settings), and creative content (place subjects in entirely new environments). For batch processing, tools like PhotoRoom handle hundreds of images at once, perfect for e-commerce sellers with large catalogues.
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Step 2: Enhance and Fix Photos Automatically
AI photo enhancement tools analyse your images and automatically improve lighting, contrast, colour balance, sharpness, and exposure. Tools like Remini, Luminar Neo, and Adobe Lightroom AI can transform a poorly lit smartphone photo into a vibrant, professional-looking image. For portraits specifically, AI smooths skin naturally, enhances eyes, and adjusts lighting without the over-processed look of heavy manual editing. These tools are particularly useful for food photography, real estate listings, and social media content.
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Step 3: Upscale and Restore Old Images
AI upscaling tools like Topaz Gigapixel AI and Upscayl increase image resolution by 2x, 4x, or even 8x while adding realistic detail. This is invaluable for printing smartphone photos at large sizes, restoring old family photographs, and improving screenshots or web images for professional use. For damaged old photos, tools like MyHeritage and Remini can repair scratches, fix tears, remove stains, and even colourise black-and-white photographs with stunning accuracy.
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Step 4: Generate Images from Text Descriptions
AI image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly create original images from text prompts. Describe what you want and AI generates it: product lifestyle shots, marketing banners, social media visuals, blog illustrations, or creative artwork. For best results, write detailed prompts specifying subject, style, lighting, colour palette, and mood. Midjourney excels at artistic and photorealistic images. Adobe Firefly is best for commercially safe images that will not have copyright issues.
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Step 5: Batch Process for Efficiency
For businesses that need to edit many images regularly, set up AI batch processing workflows. Tools like PhotoRoom and Canva Pro allow you to apply consistent edits (background removal, colour correction, resizing, watermarking) across hundreds of images simultaneously. Create templates for your common image formats: marketplace product photos, social media posts, website banners, and email headers. What used to take a graphic designer hours now takes minutes.
What This Actually Looks Like
The Prompt
I run a small jewellery business in Chiang Mai and sell on Instagram and Shopee. I take photos with my iPhone but they never look professional enough. The backgrounds are messy, lighting is inconsistent, and the images look amateur next to bigger brands. I cannot afford a photographer. Help me create professional product photos with AI.
Example output — your results will vary based on your inputs
Here is a complete AI photography workflow for your jewellery business that will rival professional studio shots. Step 1 - Capture: Take photos near a window for natural light. Place jewellery on a plain surface and shoot from multiple angles. iPhone photos are more than sufficient as our starting material. Step 2 - Background removal: Upload to PhotoRoom (free tier handles 40 images/month). AI removes the background perfectly, even around delicate chain links and gemstone settings. Step 3 - Professional backgrounds: In PhotoRoom or Canva, place your cutout jewellery onto AI-generated backgrounds. For Shopee, use clean white backgrounds. For Instagram, use lifestyle settings like marble surfaces, silk fabric, or wooden textures that AI generates. Step 4 - Enhancement: Run each final image through Remini to sharpen details and enhance the sparkle of gemstones and metals. Step 5 - Consistency: Create a Canva template for your brand with consistent sizing, logo placement, and colour grading across all product images. Batch process new products through the same pipeline. Total time per product: 5-10 minutes for 4-5 professional images. Total cost: potentially free using free tiers of PhotoRoom and Canva.
Prompts to Try
Product Photo Enhancement Prompt
I need to create professional product photos for [product type] to sell on [platform]. My current photos are taken with [device] in [conditions]. Walk me through an AI workflow to make them look professional, including background removal, enhancement, and consistent branding.
What to expect: Step-by-step AI photography workflow tailored to your product type and selling platform with specific tool recommendations and techniques.
AI Image Generation Prompt
Generate an image of [detailed description including subject, setting, lighting, style, colours, mood]. The image should be suitable for [intended use: social media, website, print, marketing]. Style reference: [photorealistic/illustration/minimalist/vintage].
What to expect: Detailed prompt optimised for AI image generators that produces high-quality results matching your vision and intended use.
Photo Restoration Prompt
I have old family photographs from [era/decade] that are [describe damage: faded, torn, scratched, water-damaged, black and white]. What is the best AI workflow to restore these photos and potentially colourise the black and white ones?
What to expect: Restoration workflow with specific tool recommendations, expected quality levels, and tips for getting the best results from AI restoration tools.
Common Mistakes
Over-Processing Images Until They Look Artificial
AI enhancement tools make it tempting to push every slider to maximum. Over-sharpened, over-saturated, over-smoothed images look worse than the originals. Use AI enhancement subtly. For portraits, keep skin texture natural. For products, maintain accurate colours. For landscapes, preserve realistic lighting. The best AI editing is invisible, making the photo look naturally better rather than obviously processed.
Using AI-Generated Images Without Checking Rights
Different AI image generators have different licensing terms. Midjourney images generated on paid plans are commercially usable. DALL-E images belong to the creator. Adobe Firefly is designed for commercial safety. Free-tier generations may have restrictions. Always check the licensing terms of your chosen AI tool before using generated images commercially, especially for advertising and product marketing.
Ignoring Consistency Across Your Image Library
Using different AI tools and settings for each image creates a jarring, unprofessional look across your website or social media feed. Establish a consistent workflow: same background removal tool, same enhancement settings, same final output format. Create templates and presets that you apply to every image for a cohesive visual brand.
Tools That Work for This
Canva AIAll-in-one design platform with AI background removal, image enhancement, text-to-image generation, and batch editing for social media and marketing.
MidjourneyLeading AI image generator producing stunning photorealistic and artistic images from text descriptions. Excellent for marketing and creative visuals.
PhotoRoomAI-powered product photography tool that removes backgrounds, generates studio-quality shots, and batch processes e-commerce images.
ReminiAI photo enhancement and restoration tool that upscales, sharpens, and restores old or low-quality photographs with impressive results.
Frequently Asked Questions
For many use cases, yes. AI-generated product shots, marketing banners, social media visuals, and blog illustrations can be indistinguishable from professionally created content. However, for certain applications like personal branding portraits, real estate where buyers expect authentic photos, and luxury product marketing where authenticity matters, professional photography still has value. The best approach is often combining real photos with AI enhancement.
Midjourney currently produces the most photorealistic images overall. Adobe Firefly is excellent for commercially safe images and integrates well with Adobe products. DALL-E 3 through ChatGPT is the easiest to use with natural language prompts. For specific use cases like product photography, specialised tools like PhotoRoom often produce better results than general-purpose generators.
AI restoration has become remarkably capable. Tools like Remini and MyHeritage can sharpen blurry faces, remove scratches, repair tears, fix water damage, and colourise black-and-white photos convincingly. Results are best when the original has enough detail for AI to work with. Severely damaged photos where faces are barely visible may not restore perfectly, but AI can still produce surprisingly good results that preserve family memories.
Next Steps
Start by taking a photo of any object with your smartphone and uploading it to remove.bg to see instant background removal. Then try Remini on an old family photograph to experience AI restoration. These two quick experiments take less than 5 minutes and will immediately show you what AI can do for your images. From there, explore Canva AI or PhotoRoom for your specific needs, whether that is product photography, social media content, or creative projects.