As a budding photographer, I’m always looking for ways to improve my craft. I recently bought an old Canon 5D Mark II full-frame camera and have aspirations to take portrait-worthy nature photos and even frame them. Recently, I discovered that ChatGPT is an amazing photo editing tool, a bot that understands not only my intentions but produces results almost instantly.

As you can imagine, the prompts you use for photo editing are critically important. Asking ChatGPT to brighten an image without being specific will produce subpar results. I should know. I asked ChatGPT to edit 50 photos including some recent nature shots but also a few archival images I snapped years ago. My goal was to compare ChatGPT to the photo editing app I use almost every day, which is Adobe Lightroom. (I also use Photoshop quite often.)

I discovered that a handful of prompts work the best, especially if you are willing to be more specific and describe exactly what you want. That step — elaborating on what you want — does take more time but it’s worth the effort. Especially if you edit a boatload of images, while a highly capable photo editor even if the bot can take its sweet time. I estimated that each of my edits took about 3-4 minutes before I had a final image. Not a problem because the overall time savings of letting the chatbot do the hard work more than makes up for any delays.

Here are the prompts that worked best for me after editing 50 images.

Brighten your images

Left image shows original beam of light. Image on the right is the edited version. John Brandon

Prompt used: Brighten the beam of light in this shot by 15%

I like how ChatGPT can bring an image to life by adding brightness, but you have to be really specific about the amount of brightness you want to add and even specify which part of the image you want to adjust. In my experience, merely asking ChatGPT to brighten an image will result in an overexposed shot that is not that useful or frame-worthy.

I edited a series of photos that showed a beam of light over a suburban neighborhood. At the time I took the photo, it looked spectacular, but the final image was too dark. (As I mentioned, I’m still learning the camera settings on my new Canon 5D.) When I asked ChatGPT to brighten the whole image by 15%, the shot still looked too overexposed. I asked the bot to brighten the beam of light by 15% and add only 5% brightness to the rest of the image. That’s not exactly hard to do in Lightroom or Photoshop, but it does take some time to select portions of a photo. I liked how ChatGPT revitalized the photo, made the trees brighter and enhanced the beam.

Put your subject matter somewhere else

Image on the left shows the mini golfer. Image on the right shows the same person on a golf course. John Brandon

Prompt used: Put this mini golfer on a real golf course

This prompt is fun and can produce amazing results. Photoshop fans know there are similar AI tools to put the subject matter into a new scene, taking someone standing on your driveway and putting them in a hot air balloon, for example. Yet, I like how fast ChatGPT can do this.

I uploaded an image of a kid playing minigolf and the final shot looked utterly realistic, as though we really were out on the links. Once again, the prompts you use need to be specific and highly descriptive. I had to tweak the image and ask ChatGPT to put a driver in the hand of the person in the photo, since you would never tee off with a putter. Oddly, this enhancement took a full five minutes to produce which seemed like an eternity. Thankfully, the new image looked even better.

Enhance the color quality

Image on the left shows the original beach photo. Image on the right is the edit by ChatGPT John Brandon / Digital Trends

Prompt used: Enhance the luminance and clarity of this image, but don’t change anything else

Unless you are a pro photographer or an expert at editing photos in Adobe Photoshop, you might not know terms like Luminance or Hue/Saturation on a daily basis. They are technical terms that have been around forever, but when you just want to make a photo look more colorful, ChatGPT is arguably better at producing quick results. I edited a series of photos at a beach near a lake where I live, focusing mostly on clarity and color quality.

I should mention that ChatGPT did not enhance the color properly on the first pass, and I had to ask for some tweaks. I ended up editing about 10 photos of the beach scene and each time I had to instruct ChatGPT to only enhance the color and make it more vibrant. I typed: “I only want you to adjust the color to make it more vibrant but don’t change anything else.”

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I learned to be more specific and used the prompt above to mention luminance. That worked remarkably well and all of my beach photos looked noticeably better. You could argue that the resulting image is too saturated, but I liked the artistic look.

By the way, I often use the instruction “don’t do anything else” to make sure the bot has some guardrails. I use that disclaimer when I ask a bot to check my writing for typos as well. When I don’t use ChatGPT, it will do a rewrite which is basically like committing treason.

Remove glare or other artifacts

Image on the left is the original photo with screen glare. ChatGPT removed the glare in the edited photo on the right. John Brandon

Prompt used: Remove the excess glare on the lower right of the laptop screen

Explaining exactly what you mean to ChatGPT is often the secret to success, as I mentioned. If your prompt is generic, you will get generic results almost every time.

I asked ChatGPT to remove the screen glare from a laptop but had to be specific about my intent by mentioning the laptop screen and that the glare was on the lower right. When I just asked ChatGPT to remove glare, it ended up enhancing the whole screen but didn’t remove the part I didn’t like on the lower right. (I messed up and typed “lower left” and that didn’t work.)

I edited another 10-12 photos this way, mostly laptop photos that all had screen glare, and in every case ChatGPT not only removed the glare but also made the image clearer.