The Year in Photography: Photo Editing Made Easier

AI played a huge role in bringing editing to the masses

I’ve been editing photos and video since the 1990s, when digital cameras first started becoming popular. I initially used bare-bones programs provided by the camera makers then graduated to full-featured software like the old Adobe Photoshop that used to cost $600 for every new edition.

I’ve struggled with removing distracting objects from photos, turning the background into black and white while retaining some color, tweaking the color, using filters to boost blacks and on and on.

The old way would take hours per photos. Now, in 2025, thanks to AI, all these tools are available to all of us, most are free, and best of all, the changes are super easy to do, and take seconds to complete.

In case you missed it, the AI revolution brought photo editing to the masses in 2025. It all happened so fast, and is still evolving as I write this. Some of the tools are built into your phone, others are standalone apps — all of them could make a huge difference with your travel photos, family portraits, and short-form videos.

A quick note: I’m not a fan of AI slop, of creating images that bear no relation to reality. I don’t approve of taking a photo and using radical tools to make it something it’s not. But I do support using editing tools to remove distractions, enhance the skies, adjust colors, all the same things I’ve done with Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom (now available for $10-$20 monthly subscription) for years.

Apple iPhone Clean Up Tool

Only available on the iPhone 15 Pro models, plus the 16 and 17 series, Apple invites you to open the editing tools in the Apple Photos app, and next to Crop is the “Clean Up” option. From here, you use your finger to basically erase an offending object from the photo—whether that be a person or in this case, an extra mountaintop that shouldn’t be seen in the above AI image, as it doesn’t really exist in Monument Valley in Arizona.

Edited in the Apple Photos app with the “Clean Up” eraser

---

Google Photos Magic Eraser

This one is available to everyone—not just folks who own iPhones. Within the Google Photos app (on recent phones) is a very similar erase tool called the “Magic Eraser” and it works in the same way as Apple’s Clean Up. To find it, open the Google Photos app, click “Edit” and slide to “Tools.”

Both the Apple and Google erasers are free to use, no subscriptions required.

Nano Banana

But speaking of Google, no company is pushing harder into image editing and AI image creation than the Mountain View, California giant. The above image was made by me asking the “Gemini 2.5” Nano Banana engine to imagine me taking images at Monument Valley with multiple phones, and I supplied a reference photo to let Gemini know what I looked like.

Besides creating images out of nothing, you can also ask it to do basic photo edits that would have taken me hours back in the oughts. As in the images below: I asked it to remove the lamp post and it did so in seconds.

Google’s Nano Banana is confusing in that it’s a tool within Google’s Gemini 3 AI offerings, but is also featured in Photoshop and others, which are only available via a subscription.

To go direct to the source and pay to use Google’s AI tools often (they start at free, with limited use) they begin at $20 monthly, but warning—once you subscribe, it supercedes previous subscriptions. So if you pay $10 monthly for extra storage in Google Drive, Gmail and Google Docs now, upgrade to the AI program and cancel, you’ve lost Google Drive, Gmail and Docs, and you’ll have to re-subscribe. (Google claims if you do it right away you won’t lose access to your content.)

I solved this dilemma, FYI, by downloading everything I have on Google Drive and backing up to multiple external hard drives. I didn’t like having a Google gun to my head.

The editing tools are excellent, but I of course worry about what they’re doing to photography. The reason I became a photographer was to share my vision of the world, which later morphed into a way to make a side-hustle living by using my eye to help people look better and happy in well posed photos. And now I travel the world to photograph the hidden beauty that surrounds us.

That said—I sure hope we’re not looking at Monument Valley with four mittens instead of the two that exist, hotel rooms that magically have sunsets out the window (we already see too many of those!) and more and more unmarked AI slop.

I’m hopeful many people will see them for what they are, and reject them out of hand.

But then, I’m an optimist.

Google’s tools can also create videos, but for that it’s early days—my results have been shoddy. But remember that at the beginning of the year, many people had thought that Google’s days were almost over, as it was overtaken in the AI race by Open AI and ChatGPT.

Google however roared back, wowed many with its Nano Banana, and Open AI issued a “code red” warning to employees about the threat from Google. And this week, Disney invested $1 billion in the company, and said it would make access to its licensed characters available for AI use within ChatGPT.

The year 2025 sure zoomed by fast, didn’t it?

AI slop at its best. The prompt asked for an image of a young child staring a giant month by month calendar of 2025. The artwork is good, but the text needs a little work. This was created in Substack

QUESTION: RAM or HARD DRIVE Space?

Leticia asks: “I’m going to buy my Mac today and was wondering if you suggest more memory as opposed to more storage I currently have one terabyte of storage and still have close to 400 GB available on that one terabyte. Should I upgrade a 2 TB a big just upgrade to 64 gigs of memory?”

RAM, RAM, RAM please. You can’t upgrade RAM after the fact, but you can always add more external storage. RAM keeps the computer running—less RAM equals stutters, slow operation and never-ending beachballs.

Apple charges $200 for extra RAM and $600 to upgrade to 2 terabytes from 1 TB.

I can get you a nice 2 TB external drive from Samsung, the T7 series, which I swear by, for $225. The 4 TB version is $329. I edit all my photos and videos on these babies. (I have many of them.)

Pismo Beach Giveaway winner will be announced Sunday

The winner of our latest promotion, two free nights at the Hilton Garden Inn in beautiful Pismo Beach, California will be announced in tomorrow’s edition, so be sure to check it out.

We’ll also reveal the details and location of our next Giveaway.

Meanwhile, we loved receiving this photo from Angela Marquez, who won the recent giveaway with our partners Lieber’s Luggage of Albuquerque, New Mexico and said of it, “best Christmas gift under the tree!!”

Happy to oblige! And thanks Dustin for shipping it out!

Thanks as always for spending the time with the newsletter. Questions about AI photo editing, travel, whatever? I’d love to hear from you. Just put them in the comments below.

Jeff