Evoto Alienated Photographers By Releasing a Tool Designed to Replace Them

Evoto Alienated Photographers By Releasing a Tool Designed to Replace Them Evoto has had a tough week. While the AI photo editing software company was on hand at Imaging USA 2026 in Nashville, a major photographic industry conference full of working professionals, news broke that the company was testing an AI Headshot Generator that promised to help users save on studio costs by bypassing professional headshot photography services altogether. The move has been criticized as tone-deaf, and Evoto quickly scrambled to try to undo the damage. What Happened? As expected, once the Evoto’s AI Headshot Generator appeared online, photographers were livid. Evoto has long marketed itself squarely at working professional photographers, promising to help them speed up their workflows and retouch their shots more quickly with carefully designed AI tools. Evoto has, and still is, focused on helping photographers with end-to-end workflow tools. The company has always been about empowering real, actual humans. So when Evoto’s AI Headshot Generator appeared, making claims that it would help people get cheap, professional headshots without needing to deal with a photographer, it appeared to be a real slap in the face of Evoto’s customer base of photographers, including ones who make their living doing, you guessed it, professional headshots in a studio. The AI Headshot Generator tool also raised questions about how Evoto may have been using its customers’ photos and data to train a new AI-based tool. It’s a reasonable question, considering that Evoto is an AI editing tool with direct access to professional photos, including countless portraits and headshots captured by real people. AI has to be trained somehow. The Response Among Photographers “What is going on here? How/Why do this to their customers? They took their customer’s money, and possibly their customer’s own editing techniques, to then turn around and create an AI headshot app? How can this even be real?” one Reddit commenter wondered. Professional photographers, including those who have worked with Evoto before, were likewise outraged. Photographer Sal Cincotta, a very early ambassador of Evoto, skewered the company in a video published this week. While Cincotta is not immune to controversy in the photography space , his sentiments in this case are echoed essentially universally. “I’m one of Evoto’s first ambassadors,” Cincotta says in the video above. “Obviously I’ve got to step away from that and rethink that because [Evoto is] trying to hurt the very people that I’m trying to help. [Evoto is] trying to hurt me, my business, my career, my earnings.” “You’ve got to see what’s coming for us,” Cincotta says later. A big part of Cincotta’s entirely reasonable anger is that it looks like Evoto trained this new AI Headshot Generator using its customers’ images, which, frankly, would make a lot of sense. Evoto is adamant this is not the case, but nobody is obliged to believe the company. And some people will never believe Evoto, clearly. Some, including Cincotta, also don’t believe that Evoto will really shelve this AI Headshot Generator, despite the...

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