Rethink Visual Storytelling: How AI-Powered Image Enhancement Drives Business Results

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by
Alfredo Deambrosi
October 25, 2024
  |  
3 minute read

Visuals play an essential role in how brands tell their stories. From product images on e-commerce platforms to the eye-catching visuals in marketing campaigns, the demand for high-quality, fast-loading images is ever-present. 

With the rapid advancement of AI technologies, businesses now have powerful tools to enhance, transform, and optimize their images, opening new possibilities for engaging their audiences.

AI-powered image enhancement is transforming the way businesses approach visual storytelling by streamlining processes like object removal, background replacement, and upscaling. These innovations don’t just save time and effort—they also drive real, measurable business results.

1. Drive efficiency with background removal

One of the most time-consuming aspects of preparing images for digital use is background removal. Whether you're unifying a brand’s visual identity or preparing product photos for an e-commerce website, ensuring that images are clean, professional, and distraction-free is critical.

AI-powered background removal technology drastically simplifies this process. It allows businesses to automatically remove backgrounds with precision, leaving the primary subject of the image intact. By leveraging AI for this task, brands can maintain visual consistency across their platforms while eliminating the need for manual editing.

Take the example of Chronext, a global luxury watch marketplace. The company implemented automated background removal to streamline its image workflow. What once was tedious work for their photo editors was now an automatic process. 

As a result, Chronext reduced image response times by 80%, drastically improving user experience without compromising on the quality of their visuals. By leveraging AI, Chronext has managed to drive efficiency while delivering polished, professional images that enhance brand credibility.

2. Boost engagement with background replacement

AI-powered background replacement offers marketers a quick and flexible way to transform image settings without the need for multiple photoshoots. With just a few simple commands, you can place your products in dynamic, contextually relevant environments. 

For instance, a product shot taken in a studio can easily be adapted to a seasonal or thematic setting, such as a beach or a cityscape, allowing brands to refresh content without the logistical burdens of traditional shoots. 

This AI function not only saves time but also drives engagement by ensuring images resonate with different audiences or campaigns. Background replacement empowers brands to maintain visual consistency while meeting diverse creative needs effortlessly.

3. Enhance brand perception by upscaling with super resolution

Another critical challenge for brands is ensuring that images maintain their quality across different platforms and formats. Low-resolution images can undermine user trust and degrade the overall user experience. But AI-powered super resolution provides a solution by intelligently upscaling images without sacrificing quality.

Super resolution allows businesses to enhance the resolution of images up to four times, making even older or user-generated content appear sharp and professional. This can be especially useful for brands that work with a high volume of visual content, like e-commerce sites or marketing teams that need to repurpose existing images.

For example, a software provider designed to help businesses manage and market inventory was able to use AI-driven upscaling to improve the quality of low-resolution images. Originally working with images as small as 600 pixels wide, the provider upscaled them to 1600 pixels, improving the overall appearance and performance of its digital platforms. This not only improved the visual appeal of their inventory but also enhanced the page load times, creating a better customer experience.

By using AI-powered upscaling, businesses can ensure that every image—regardless of its original quality—meets the high standards of today’s digital landscape, enhancing both brand perception and performance.

4. Improve accessibility and SEO with AI-generated alt text

In addition to improving visual quality, AI is also reshaping how businesses manage and optimize their image metadata. Alt text, which provides descriptions for images, is crucial for both accessibility and SEO, ensuring that websites are inclusive to visually impaired users and easily searchable by search engines. However, creating relevant alt text for every image can be a time-consuming process, especially for brands managing a large volume of content.

AI-generated alt text automates this process, ensuring that every image has a meaningful description without the need for manual effort. This addition not only improves accessibility but also boosts search engine optimization (SEO), helping brands increase their organic visibility online.

By automating alt text generation, businesses can enhance their website’s accessibility, improve user experience, and ensure that their content reaches a broader audience—all while improving their SEO rankings.

5. Streamline asset management with automatic tagging

AI-driven auto-tagging significantly streamlines the process of managing large libraries of images by automatically assigning relevant tags. Instead of manually labeling each image, marketers can rely on sophisticated machine learning to identify objects, colors, and other details in seconds. 

This tagging not only makes the images more accessible for internal searches but also enhances SEO, making visual content easier to find and categorize across platforms.

6. Expand creative possibilities with generative fill

Generative fill enhances content creation by allowing users to extend, fill, or recreate sections of their images with incredible precision. This feature intuitively analyzes the context and style of an image, generating seamless additions that align perfectly with the original content. 

Marketers can adjust focal points or change aspect ratios effortlessly, ensuring that each visual fits its intended platform or format. Additionally, the ability to prompt the AI with specific instructions enables brands to explore endless variations of their visuals, keeping content fresh and relevant while reducing production costs. 

With generative fill, users can continuously innovate without the need for reshooting or extensive editing, boosting creative agility.

7. Refine visuals with object removal

Visual clutter can detract from the impact of an image. Object removal allows businesses to clean up their visuals by erasing unwanted elements, keeping the focus on what matters. 

For example, real estate companies can remove personal belongings or mismatched furniture from property photos to make spaces look more appealing. 

Similarly, product marketers can remove unnecessary objects that distract from the main item, ensuring their images align with their brand's aesthetic. This streamlined process helps maintain a professional look across marketing materials, saving time compared to traditional editing workflows.

8. Streamline creative workflows through AI composability

Composability makes it easy to apply multiple transformations to images in one seamless workflow. Whether businesses need to remove objects, replace backgrounds, or upscale visuals, they can combine various functions without switching between design platforms. 

For instance, an e-commerce retailer can use composability to remove a product's background, enhance its resolution, and place it in a seasonal setting, all in a single process. This capability allows brands to repurpose images efficiently, minimizing production costs while ensuring each visual fits the campaign's unique needs.

Empower your business with AI-enhanced visuals

In an era where digital experiences are dominated by visuals, it’s clear that AI-powered image enhancement is a game-changer for businesses. By using AI for a variety of tasks, brands can automate their processes, ensure consistent quality, and ultimately drive better results.

These technologies empower businesses to focus more on storytelling and creativity while allowing AI to handle the repetitive and technical aspects of image processing. As a result, businesses can deliver more polished, professional visuals that engage their audiences and improve performance.

Ready to unlock the power of AI for your marketing?

Discover how AI-powered image enhancements can elevate your digital marketing strategy. 

Watch our on-demand webinar, “Unlocking the Power of AI for Images in Digital Marketing,” to learn practical techniques for creating high-quality visuals that resonate with your audience and drive real business results.