VSCO CEO Eric Wittman on AI Lab tools for photographers and the $105B photography services market

so much for coming on the show. Thank you for visiting dome. Uh, we have Eric Whitman from Visco coming on the show next. He's in the reream waiting room. We'll bring him into the TBP and Ultradome. How are you doing? What's going on? Good to see you. Doing great. How you doing, guys? Good to see you.

Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Great to have you. Uh, give us a give us a state of the union with Visco. I I think a lot of people are familiar with the product. Uh, they know the the general story, but I'd love to get just kind of the update and kind of level set for where the business is today.

Yeah, appreciate that. Uh yeah, look, Visco, it's it's been a minute, right? Visco has been around for 14 years now. Hard to believe. Success. Oh, that's what we love to see. An overnight success. Yeah, I love it. Yeah.

So, uh you know, and you know, we're we're a very proud company that's been here supporting creatives and photographers and creators overall uh for, you know, well over a decade. And what, you know, we love our jobs.

I mean we love building for creatives and you know we've seen various moments in time uh come about for Visco but I think especially right now with the world and what's happening with AI you know right now people especially photographers and creatives are looking for a company that has their back and is building tools for them is really helping them find ways to be successful whether it's just things doing things on the side or making a full-time living uh as a creative So that's really what we've been up to.

Cool. Uh take us through the most recent updates and then I have a bunch of uh uh ideas to pitch you, get feedback on, uh understand more about I mean basically how I can level up my photography workflow. Yeah, I love it.

Uh yeah, so uh you know obviously AI's uh is impacting the whole industry and uh a lot of photographers and a lot of creatives and you know our perspective has always been how do we preserve the craft?

how do we preserve the artistry but also bringing some of those benefits that AI can provide to support you know the creative process.

Uh so the last couple years we've been releasing tools like for example Visco Hub which is actually a visual search engine powered by AI that makes it really easy for brands and people to find and hire photographers based upon their content. Uh we earlier this year launched a product called Visco Canvas.

And if you think about a lot of creative processes, especially when you're working with clients, there's always this ideation phase and a mood boarding phase.

And so we were one of the first to come out with a specific moodboarding tool that not only had generative as a part of it, but also allowed you to search this amazing community of literally 300 plus million people on Visco and their content and then bring your own content to the four.

So really a hybrid uh in a hybrid way. And then uh today uh big news is we've just come out with a whole new suite of tools. We call it AI lab because we know a lot of this technology as we hear about on your show almost daily continues to evolve this massively rapid clip and I see the gong getting ready.

So AI lab, thank you. I was wondering if I was going to get a gong and now I love product launches here. Okay, here's here here's a here's a uh a workflow that I struggle with uh regularly and I want you to walk me through how I could how I could level it up.

So, um, I'll often go out and shoot photos and I shoot RAWs and then I get to this point where I need to go and color correct and edit the RAWs and I hate that process and I if I bring it into Photoshop, there's that auto button and it never gets it right.

And I feel like there's room for AI to fine-tune on what it takes to actually take a raw image and then make it look great in color correction. Um, that's not generative AI. I don't want to regenerate the image. I want the actual pixels there.

I just want to understand, you know, the different looks kind of like AI filters.

I've tried different apps and a lot of the apps, they they kind of like hit everything with a different colored hammer and they all get really extreme and I'm and then I see ads for like, oh, I got this filter pack and it looks great, but then you apply it and it's not right on your photos cuz you shot slightly differently.

So what do you think the future of like just you still want to go capture a real image, a raw image, but then you just want to speed up that workflow of the post process once you have a great raw. I love it. I love this example because actually the future is here now.

So actually with Visco today you can import those raw images in and we actually have some ML built into the product today that we will look at that image that you have and we will actually recommend a set of presets. So we have hundreds of different presets.

Some of them are the world's best film emulation presets all the way down to presets that our own color scientists have created that are really beautiful.

I mean, a lot of these ads that you see for preset packs, they're basically people that have tried to copy our our work that's been around, like I said, for 10 plus years.

And there are still photographers that are doing work for National Geographic, big campaigns like that wonderful fruit company in Certino, and they are still using our color grading presets as their default starting point so that they can just get that great look much more quickly.

So, the future is here already today, John. It's uh it starts with Visco into our Visco studio. You can import your RAWs use for this photo to automatically pick the right preset and then you take your creative process from there. Again, we're not trying to get in the way uh from an AI perspective.

We want AI to be supportive of your overall creative process. What is the general sentiment in the photographer community today around AI? We had an we had one uh shoot earlier this year with a photographer who was so deathly afraid of AI.

He was hoping that the government would regulate it so that certain products could only be like legally had to be authentically photographed. Uh because he was worried that people would just be generating a variety of images of them.

Meanwhile, we have like an insatiable demand for photography where we do shoots all the time for different media things. Even I think in my home, right, I don't I could go and generate hundreds of images of my family and yet I still we still hire photographers a few times a year to take family photos.

And so I even even if the models get 100 times better, which I don't even know if they can get 100 times better because they're already so photoreal. I just think that photographers that are craftd driven that like that genuinely enjoy photography and that want to uh capture moments will always have uh a job.

That may that might be naive, but that's my current feeling today. And I'm curious how the broad community on Visco is thinking about it. I I I I think that's right. I mean, look, I I think we all should all recognize there's tension today, right?

And and I I I think back like look, I've I've been in this industry for 30 plus years. I've seen a lot of hype and, you know, where it ends up, you know, resolving to itself like e-commerce, right? When it first started happening, everyone thought, oh, brickandmortar stores are going to go away.

The reality is 16% of overall commerce h happens through e-commerce today. the rest is still very much brick and mortar. So I do think you know when AI and especially generative AI came out you did have a lot of photographers that saw it as a threat and there are certain categories where realistically it is a threat.

Stock photography is a perfect example. I think this is why you see companies like uh Shuttertock and Getty are coming together because you know there's going to be there already is duress in the stock photography market but as you're saying like there are different segments of photography.

I mean, the photography services market is $105 billion a year. Uh, it's going to grow to 160 $150 billion a year uh by 2030. So, it's still a growing market, which most people don't realize. Uh, so I think the question's always been, well, how is AI going to affect me and my specific line of work?

I think where more and more photographers are now rationalizing is they're now starting to realize actually how helpful it can be to them, especially for the mundane tasks that they really don't like. So, we were talking about color grading and sort of the editing part of the process.

You know, there are aspects of the editing process that are really mundane. Like, if you're a wedding photographer and you're shooting 10,000 photos, how do I quickly callull through that? Today, it's very much a manual process and it does not give photographers energy.

Um, but there are more and more companies that are coming out with calling tools that will automatically apply um your look and also because they've learned what your look has be as has has become over years and years of editing and they'll also just take out the shots that aren't really, you know, like you see an airplane in the background, okay, take that one out, right?

That it just AI is is supportive of that. I think another area that I think is very emerging and you're going to see a lot more from Visco on this front. I I can't wait to come back and bang that gong a few more times with y'all. But is that, you know, a lot of photographers are excellent at their craft.

They're excellent at the artistry and what they do. What they are not great at is marketing, managing their business. And so they're just mundane tasks around managing customer relationships and responding back to people and making sure that your your edit list is appropriately organized, like all that stuff.

Qualifying clients is another great example. So we we actually uh announced a a product called Visco Workspace that is the whole point is to help photographers effectively manage their business and we are rapidly AI enabling that product so that we can again take a lot of those mundane tasks out.

So that's where as we think about things, it's very much about craft and integrity, being very humanentric from a photography creator standpoint, but AI is going to assist you in a lot of those mundane tasks. And our goal is to be that platform for photographers.

Did you always know you were going to come in and and build uh SAS at Visco? Was that was that the was that the plan? I mean B2B SAS specifically, obviously you were at Atlassian, then you were at Figma. you you're kind of a SAS uh demagod, you know, George. I do love it, man.

I can't I can't look at a business and not think SAS. I'm not going to lie. Uh I have us, too. There's there's a few things better in the world. I have I I have a question about uh AI and uh the the trajectory of smartphone photography. So, um I I I recently got the latest iPhone, 48 megapixels, three different cameras.

Uh and I saw a video where they were it was on MKBHD and he was testing, I think it was Leica versus iPhone. Uh can you tell the difference? It was very, very hard. But they really made it harder by only doing uh extreme, you know, no shallow depth of field landscape photography, super bright.

They weren't shooting some moody scene in a smoky bar at night with, you know, controlled lighting or something like that.

Uh, and so we've been in this interesting era where the smartphone is it it it it got amazing superhuman level or or super, you know, Leica level at a certain niche in photography, but you it really has not replaced like moody portrait lighting where you want shallow depth of field like just because of the physics of the lens.

And I'm wondering if you think AI generative AI will do the same thing because I'm just thinking about like even in the stock photography example like if I'm buying a stock photo of Yoseite like even if it looks photoreal like I want half-doome in the right place. I don't want a halfdme.

I don't want something that looks like half-dme. I like the the reason I'm buying that stock image is because I can see exactly the shape of half-dom perfectly. Not uh, you know, something that feels right and looks photoreal, but isn't actually real. And that applies to so many different things.

We need a stock photo of a Manhattan street and the the layout of that street is important. And so I'm wondering where you think the pockets of photography will stay around forever uh versus the ones that are like going a layer deeper on that. Yeah. H it's a great question.

I mean I mean first of all I think composition is arguably one of these most important things for you to learn in photography. You know most people will say that Ancel Adams wasn't a great photographer. He was amazing at composition and editing.

I mean he was one of the original contributors to Photoshop like back in the day. you know, little little known fact, but you know, it is about that editing process.

So, yes, you've got to get that composition right, but often times, you know, that shot that's actually taken doesn't match the vision of what the photographer had in their head. And I do think, you know, where AI is interesting is it's starting to help people sort of, hey, you have this vision.

Lighting is a is a is another classic example, right? Lighting is something that most photographers, you know, even the best of them like mess up. and being able to use um AI to help augment right and correct some of the lighting issues or like composition issues.

I think that's another area that's really that there's more and more investment that's happening there. We're obviously taking a look at some of that as well. Uh but I think that's where it can it can aid, right?

And regardless of whether you're using an iPhone or if you're you got a very expensive Leica, love Leas, great products, but you know, from an approachability standpoint, the iPhones are much more approachable for the average person. And you when people are just getting started into photography, right?

Like I think e even not even the latest iPhone, but like old iPhones, pick an iPhone 12 Pro and start to experiment with that and really just build your craft, build your look.

That's why people love coming to Visco because they get to see what other people are doing like authentic work that isn't tainted by a lot of slop that's out there, right? And then they get to learn from other people and and I think that's also very important, right?

Don't you know being a photographer, especially a professional photographer is a lonely place, right? I mean, being a creative is a lonely place.

And so if you can find communities of people, you know, we sponsor a lot of photo walks, just meet up with these folks, get to learn from each other and, you know, learn about the tools that they're using, learn about the techniques, see the gear and the camera.

Ultimately, it's about bringing people together, uh, and to help support and elevate their work and their craft. Uh, and whatever that is, whether it's technology or just going old school with doing inerson stuff, I mean, we're all here for that. You spent 15 years at Adobe.

Do you think the market misunderstands Adobe's AI opportunity?

Because from my view it's like you have some of the most advanced tools the most advanced tools for uh creating uh uh creating media across you know different categories and uh if AI makes it better you know if AI is a tool that just makes these processes better and more accessible I would think that creates an amazing opportunity but the stock's down 34% uh in the last year they haven't found a way to get people to understand the opportunity, but I'm curious like what your framework is for Adobe uh in in uh the year 2025.

Yeah, I mean obviously, you know, I'm I'm a fan of Adobe. I spent a long time there. I came through the Macdia acquisition and, you know, I think there's still a lot of smart people out there trying to figure out some of these things.

I think what people realize is that you know Adobe used to be this unassalable you know company right and it was very very dominant in the market and then this company called Figma comes around and really proves like oh there's actually a whole new market opportunity that's adjacent to Adobe that also can be served by someone else Canva same thing right Canva is also looking at another part of the market that wasn't was underserved and so I think that's probably why you're seeing duress less, you know, in in in the Adobe stock.

It's less about the AI market opportunity, which I think is very big, but there's a lot of players there right now. And and who knows? I mean, right now, this is an absolute land grab opportunity where people are experimenting. They're coming out with different tools.

Just look at how capital allocators are treating the market right now. I mean, they really don't know. They're it's almost impossible to underwrite, you know, the the the valuations of these companies right now because it's really a guess.

people are just trying to pick what they think is going to be the the the winner of of these respective categories. So, me personally, very long on the AI opportunity for the creative community.

I think you alluded to this earlier, like there's just a thirst, forget a thirst, like a massive hunger for really high quality content at a volume that we've never seen before. And we know that generative AI isn't cutting it.

Even if generative continues to get better over the next 3 to 5 years, there still is a certain amount of work that will always need to be human created. It will always need to be authentic and genuine, especially when it comes to what brands want and need. Uh, and you know, humans are very instinctual creatures, too.

So, even though I see a lot of these tests online, can you tell the difference between what's real AI and what's not? Like, you know, I think humans understand like what what is real still?

and and I I think that's something that we're we're going to continue to see more and more content being created by real people um for a long long time. So, I'm I'm long on that bet, but long also um I'm I'm a big believer in the opportunity that AI uh is going to present in supporting the the human creatives out there.

I agree. Totally. Uh well, thank you so much for stopping by. Super fun. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. So great to see you guys. Thanks for having me on. Cheers. Cheers. Before we bring out our next guest, let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat GPT.

Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Uh, our last guest couldn't talk trash about Adobe. Didn't want to talk trash about Adobe, but I'm happy to. I've been having a terrible experience with Adobe and I'm so mad at the company. 30%. It should be 100%.

Because And I'll tell you why. It's so simple. So, I I I use You want that? John is calling for the stock to drop 100. It's not that serious, but I am very annoyed with Adobe because for a long time I've been using an app on my iPhone called Photoshop Mix.

And Photoshop Mix allowed you to take two photos and layer them over each other. Very helpful for making memes. You could take one image, you could cut it out, put in another one. Eventually, they put ads in front of every single you had to you you had to click an X to get out of an ad every time you open the app. Fine.

I'm already paying for Adobe. I don't know why I also get these ads for the other app. Very annoying. I finally bail on the app because they just break it entirely. It's not working at all. I get a new app, Photoshop Express. This is their new app for the iPhone. They've fixed it. You don't need Photoshop Mix anymore.

You're on Photoshop Express. And so, I get Photoshop Express. And I learn all the new tools, all their new UI, and I figure out how to do basically the same thing in the new app, Photoshop Express. Then, I get a new iPhone. Guess what happens? They completely killed Photoshop Express.

They they to they literally took the feature out of of cutting out one image and putting it out over the other. You can't do layers in Photoshop Express anymore. So then I need to move to Photoshop the actual do layers in this country. You can't even do layers in this country anymore.

And so now I'm on the actual Photoshop app, the third app. I'm very upset. And maybe it's better. Maybe I'll be happy in a couple months. But I've been shocked with how difficult it is to just I I guess I'm just such a weird power user of like niche.

like I want to do everything on my phone that I'm just demanding a niche set of uh of products and and features that just don't exist anywhere else. But uh I've been very very upset with my Adobe experience. So anyway, that's my rant for today against Adobe. But hopefully they can turn it around.

They do have a huge opportunity in front of them. Hopefully they get some sharp people who start building uh great products and apps because uh I would love to be using them. Well, fortunately, uh I believe the president of Adobe is coming on uh later this month. Really? Fantastic. I can take it up and down.

Talk talk with them about I I I can talk about the wrongful death