A New Chapter
Mastin Labs & Aftershoot are together now
Bringing Kirk Mastin's approach to color and film-inspired editing together with a smarter workflow.
The presets stay. What changes is how long it takes to get the consistent look across a full gallery.
In 2013 I started shooting the same scene twice, once on film, once on digital. Portra, then Fuji. I developed the negatives and scanned them myself on a Fuji Frontier, then worked the digital file by hand until it matched the scan. The color, the grain, the way the highlights rolled off. That's how Mastin Labs started. It started as something I made for myself.
What grew from it wasn't a preset library. It was a community of photographers who wanted their digital files to sit next to their film without anyone noticing the difference.
The bigger it got, the more I heard the same thing in different words. The look was right, but getting it right across a whole wedding still took hours you didn't have.
I knew AI could take that part. I also knew what AI usually does to something built by hand, which is flatten it. Every version I'd seen ended with the software deciding how the work should look, and I'd have left the problem unsolved rather than solve it that way.
When I went looking, I found Aftershoot. It's co-built by Justin Benson, a working photographer, and the AI there doesn't decide how the work should look. You do. It carries that decision across every frame after it. The look was never the bottleneck. Applying it, frame by frame, year after year, was.
What doesn't change.
Mastin Labs isn't going anywhere. The film presets stay, for Lightroom and Capture One, and they keep doing what they've always done, which is let you match digital to film on any camera you own.
The community stays. Photographers who want their digital work to carry what film gave them still have somewhere to find each other.
The education stays. Getting exposure and white balance right, knowing which stock suits the light you're in, learning why your edit isn't landing. That's what we've always taught, and it continues.
Where you get the time back
Bring in a full shoot and Aftershoot pulls out the duplicates, the blinks, the frames you'd never deliver. Then a Mastin AI Style goes across what's left, holding as the light changes. Same looks you know, built from the same scans, running on a whole gallery instead of one image at a time. No more sitting at image 437 trying to make it feel like image 12.
Three things were non-negotiable for me before any of this, and they stay true now.
These are the three things Mastin was built on and they'll stay true, even after the acquisition.
Your work stays yours.
Nothing you shoot, edit, or upload is ever used to train a look for anyone else.
The look holds.
Every Mastin AI Style comes straight from my own film scans, not an AI's best guess at film. That's how the ones you have today were made, and it's how the next ones get made.
You're still deciding.
Every edit stays non-destructive, reviewable, and yours to adjust or override. The tool does the repetitive part, not the deciding part.
What's left is the work that actually needed you.
Mastin brings the look. Aftershoot brings the workflow.
Your eye stays yours, and the look stays Mastin.
-Kirk Mastin
