I used to be into photography. I shot with a DSLR and edited everything in Lightroom. Then the interest faded — but the pull toward good-looking images never did.
What's more, the clients who come to us for website development want beautiful photos too. Especially when it's product photography for an online store.
For a long time we handled it with one fixed algorithm in GIMP. Every photo separately. Then came a small script — the first stirrings of automation.
And now, when AI writes the code, it would have been a sin not to build a proper program. One that turns a flat, lifeless photo into this:
You have to agree: the second one is juicier. And for an online store, that matters a lot.
So here it is — AG Image Tune. It processes your photos very quickly, using your own settings.
What you actually get:
- Folder in, folder out. Point it at a source folder and a destination folder, press Process folder, and it works through the whole batch with several parallel workers. A full catalogue doesn't have to take the whole evening.
- Look before you leap. Preview one image… shows you the original next to the result, so you're not committing to a batch until you like what you see.
- Real colour control. An optional LAB chroma pass remaps the a* and b* channels before the glow runs — that's the colour work doing the heavy lifting. If you've ever tuned curves in GIMP, you'll recognise the numbers.
- A live log while it runs, so you can see exactly where it is.
The effect itself is a recipe I'd been running by hand in GIMP for years: the inverted-blur soft-light glow — the classic one that lifts contrast and gives bright areas a gentle halo. That's the original. Now it's automated, with the Lab work folded in, which is the part that makes photos look like they were shot properly rather than just brightened.
Where to get it
You can grab it on my GitHub — AGImageTune.exe is a portable Windows app, about 19 MB, and needs no installation. It just runs.
The project page also carries two other flavours, if a GUI isn't your thing:
- a GIMP 3.2 plugin — apply the effect straight from Filters → AGImage → AG Image Tune;
- a Python + Pillow batch script — same algorithm from the command line, for the terminal-minded.
One practical note for Windows: the file is unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn you the first time you run it. Click More info → Run anyway. That's the standard ceremony for any unsigned tool from GitHub — not a sign that something is wrong.
It's free, with no restrictions. MIT licensed — use it, change it, pass it on.
Just make your product photos better. That will make me happy.
