Inside Evoto: Speed, Trust, And Authenticity In Photo Editing

Ever wish your edits moved fast? We sat down with Jay Peterson of Evoto to unpack how AI can make portrait workflows radically quicker without removing the realism that clients recognize and trust. Peterson explains Evoto’s slider-first, standalone desktop editor and how its proprietary algorithms target the work that slows pros down—frequency separation, dodging and burning, glasses glare, and flyaway hair—while keeping processing local for privacy and consistency.

We also discuss Evoto’s short-lived AI headshot generator function. Peterson shares what happened, why the positioning landed poorly with working photographers, and the decision to kill it. The takeaway is bigger than one feature—if you serve pros, you build for pros, and your messaging must respect the craft. Authenticity isn’t a buzzword here; it’s the backbone of trust, referrals, and long-term client relationships. That means edits that look like people, not plastic, and tools that make deadlines easier without erasing intent.

From there, we dive into the issues everyone’s arguing about: training data, school photo privacy, and the anxiety that “AI will replace me.” Peterson details Evoto’s no-touch stance—local processing, no cloud file access, and opt-in, paid datasets—plus why plain-English communication beats policy-speak when parents and clients ask tough questions.

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Transcript

Erin Manning 0:00

The Dead Pixel Society Podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers. Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Gary Pageau 0:19

Hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Jay Peterson, who's the guru of America for Evoto. I don't know what else to call you, Jay. Everyone just knows you as the Evoto guy. And he's here to talk about AI, how it's impacting the industry, how it's impacting how people are perceiving portraits and more. So hi Jay, how are you?

Jay Peterson 0:47

I'm doing well, Gary. Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to chatting with you.

Gary Pageau 0:51

Everyone kind of knows, I've heard a lot about Evoto over the years. What's your story about coming? Where'd you come from, and how'd you get connected to e Voto and going from there? Sure.

Jay Peterson 1:02

Yeah, it's a good question. So I've been in the industry for a long time. I've been sort of dancing between, I'll call it mixed media. I've been between photography and the professional video space for a very long time. My foundation started, honestly, it started in in real estate and architectural photography. That's where I got my start. Really? Yeah, I believe it or not. No people in the no, no people. So yeah, I I got I got my start in the dark room back. This was before we went digital. And then after that old. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I don't know. But I yeah, I pivoted into real estate and architectural photography because that's that was actually something I was going to pursue. I wanted to go to school for architecture, and I found photography along the way, and then the rest is history. So as a result of working in the real estate photography space, I pivoted into headshots and portraits and all sorts of other things, which led me eventually to product photography, which I actually, believe it or not, still do to this day. I do photograph like jewelry and that type of stuff for fun when I have time, which I don't have. But that's yeah, that's a little bit about my my background. I worked in the professional video space for a long time. Everything from cameras and optics to support equipment and system integration and software, and all of these things led me to Evota, to my current role right now, which is, yeah, I'm kind of the, I suppose, part of part face and spokesperson for the company, but deeply embedded with the team in a lot of different capacities. So that's for for those that are um learning about Evoto for the first time, it's it's an all-in-one software editing tool. Uh we do a little bit of everything. It's it's it's for retouching, it's for workflow. And it does, it does, it's a pretty heavy, it's got a lot of utility to it. It's a pretty heavy application that really ideally, the the whole the whole thesis for the system is that it reduces the stress and the time spent going through the post-production process. It's a slider-based system, and we're trying to make you know post-production and editing easy.

Gary Pageau 3:02

So, where is the company based? If you're Mr. North America country, where is the country they are from?

Jay Peterson 3:09

Singapore. So HQ is out of Singapore, and for the U.S. team, myself included, we're we're we're a distributed team. We're we're all remote here in the States. We've got folks in Florida, we've got folks in New York, North Carolina. I'm in Austin, Texas. We've got folks in Arizona, and I believe we just hired somebody who might be also on the East Coast somewhere.

Gary Pageau 3:32

Wow. So Singapore, just for for my regular listeners, my our friends at photobook.ai are from Singapore. And so and so we all know they do bulletproof software there. They do some great stuff. Excellent.

Jay Peterson 3:45

They do some great stuff. Very, very talented. They've got the talent pool is rich in in that part of the world. And the team that I'm I'm very, very, very lucky, and I'm and I'm being very, very serious about this. Very lucky. The the folks that I get to work with at Evoto, the from the software developers to the leadership team are incredibly they're genuine and they're smart. And it's been such a pleasure to work with like an international company that has been, you know, is challenging us here in the states, like the US representatives, to to really, you know, raise raise the bar and improve the industry.

Gary Pageau 4:20

Is the platform the same across regions? Because I know there's like different aesthetics in different regions, right? In terms of what people are looking for. So is that part of your role? Do you communicate some of that stuff back?

Jay Peterson 4:32

Or what's what's yeah, very much, very much so. Yeah, it's a great question. It's it's I would say yes. Generally speaking, the platform there's continuity in in the different regions. Of course, there's different, you know, there's language adjustments uh in a little some of the user interface might be adaptive for different markets or different, you know, different parts of the world. But generally speaking, if you were to download, you know, the program in any other part of the world, it's gonna look and feel almost identical.

Gary Pageau 5:00

Right. So so what I mean, is it is it web-based? Is it an app? Is it all of those things together? You know, for those who don't know anything about how it functions, can you just kind of walk that through?

Jay Peterson 5:13

Yeah, sure. That's that's a good question, too. So the the core product, I'll call it our Evoto's Halo product, is EvoTo Desktop. And this is a standalone desktop application that runs locally on your computer or your device. There is also an iPad version. There's also a mobile version for Android and iOS. Right. And we do have some other products, but the the key product that we'll probably spend the most time talking about today anyway is Evoto Desktop. So this is a standalone desktop app that you'll use as a dedicated editing tool. It is different and it does, it does not necessarily connect to other editing tools that a professional photographer or editor might use, but there is can there is some connectivity between other tools. But yeah, it's it's very much a standalone. It's it's intended to be its own its own program.

Gary Pageau 6:01

To boil it down, it's ingestion, editing, and then export. Yeah, all of those things.

Jay Peterson 6:09

Exactly. Yeah, it's it is your entire editing workflow, top to bottom. Exactly right.

Gary Pageau 6:15

Okay. So one of the things you've got there is some artificial intelligence, right? Some AI, whatever, whatever that nomenclature is. In the context of Evoto, what in what do you mean by AI?

Jay Peterson 6:28

Yeah, it's the the the big question, right? What is what is AI and what does it mean to to your company or your software? So it's, I think, where the AI functionality inside of Evoto means that we've taken the most complicated stuff or functions. Think frequency separation, dodging and burning, AI color corrections for pixel by pixel readout and adjustment of a photo, glasses glare removal, straight hair removal, the really complicated stuff that would normally take a photographer or an editor several minutes or maybe hours to do on an individual photo. What our AI does is algorithmically, it has been trained to identify these troublesome areas. Like we'll just use glasses glare as an example. So the R AI, our algorithm has been it's a proprietary algorithm that's been crafted to identify glasses glare and remove glasses glare in an intelligent way. That's the whole story short. And it and it remains true for a lot of the other effects or features that are in the system that have maybe an AI branding on them. Right. But the reality, Gary, is like AI is in everything. It's it's I mean, it's not necessarily just you know Chat GPT and the nano bananas of the world, but you know, Lightroom has a lot of AI functions already built into it. It's got an AI remove tool. And uh it it's it's not too dissimilar. It's it's it's actually strikingly similar to a lot of the same functionalities that exist in e Voto. Ours is just a little bit different. We're like I said, we're we've got proprietary algorithms that power all of our stuff, and AI is kind of running the whole program at this point, really.

Gary Pageau 8:03

Yeah, and it's certainly a big topic. Now, we'd be remiss if we didn't get into some topical issues with evoto, because you had a little bit of controversy earlier this year, and we're gonna talk about it. So yeah, talk a little bit about what led up to the controversy for those who aren't familiar who maybe don't lurk on the various photography forms where people were having conniption fits. What led up to that? And then get into the reason why you came out with that feature to begin with.

Jay Peterson 8:34

Absolutely. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about it and add some clarity. We we definitely got ourselves into a situation with this that honestly we we shouldn't have. Candidly, it was it was a big misstep on on Ivoto's side and partly my responsibility too. What ended up happening is EvoT developed or or crafted an AI headshot generator. And this I think was was negatively received by a lot of our core users and a lot of our key customers that are headshot photographers.

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Gary Pageau 9:05

So so what do you mean by that? I mean, can you just define what an AI headshot generator is? Is it was it just taking like a an iPhone photo and creating a portrait out of it?

Jay Peterson 9:39

Essentially, yes. So it uh this is a a system that was piggybacked off of a third-party API that would enable a user through a web interface, not through Ivoto desktop, but this was actually directly through our website. You would upload a photo, it could be any type of photo, and it uh the the AI magic would happen behind the scenes through this third-party API, and it would render out a professional-looking headshot that went through a series of different prompts that Ivoto had uh crafted, I suppose, or or written as part of that third-party API. So the the the whole idea for this was just to give photographers, I think, a an easier way to generate more photos so that they could move even faster through the post-production process. The problem here is that a lot of the language that was crafted to promote this thing, which it really was mostly used for promoting and really brand awareness, some of the language was misguided. Some of the language said it had stuff, it had some particular verbiage like replacing photographers, or you no longer need a photographer. Right. That's the problem.

Gary Pageau 10:48

And that's that's where it's Yeah, because I was gonna say there's, I mean, if you just do a cursory search, if you look for a headshot generator, there's all kinds of them. I mean, clearly you guys you I mean, you guys, like you said, you didn't even develop the technology, it's just tied into somebody else's. But so it's more of a PR thing, I think, is what you're saying. That that was sort of the stumble was the sensitivity to the fact that photographers feel that there's competition for their work from people who don't want to pay for professional photographers. I so was the misconception that they thought that consumers were gonna use this. I guess that's what I'm putting there to the confusion. Because consumers weren't gonna go to Evoto buy credits just to do a headshot.

Jay Peterson 11:32

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're you're probably right. But I think that there's there's an underlying fear about losing business to consumers. The underlying fear, I think, for all photographers and myself included. I remember it's competitive. We're all looking for more business all of the time. We're all doing business development and sales all the time, looking, looking to fill our calendars with with work. And the I think the underlying fear with AI, it all there's all connecting dots here over to AI is going to take my job, it's gonna replace me. And I think that's a nerve that we struck on this one. Absolutely, unintentionally, and in huge mistake. Like I said, we we had we this was a big misstep on our part. And and it was a real lesson learned because this was all just supposed to be a web-based experiment for the SEO team to drive more traffic over to Evota. We were trying to attract more professional photographers, and in doing so, by again, some of the language, but also the world doesn't need another AI headshot generator, and it doesn't need it from Evoto, certainly from Evoto. So, I mean, the the the reality of the situation is, and one of the major lessons learned is number one, communication gaps. I mean, that's really how this this kind of made it through the cracks. Right. And number two, an AI headshot generator doesn't necessarily align to the way in which evoto serves professional photographers. And I think it's important for, I mean, for anybody that's listening to this too, it's important for you guys, for for the pros that use evo and pay for evota right now. We we can't put you guys out of business. If we put you out of business, we go out of business. Right. And that's I think that what one of the most important things that I think the maybe some some folks on the team were not maybe connecting those dots, but we've reconciled since is this really put a strain on the relationship with our paying customers, right? Creates a little bit of bad sentiment. So now, I mean, I mean, that's a lot of the work that that myself and the team are doing behind the scenes is to try to spread the message that look, we're we've killed this thing. The AI headshot generator is not coming back around. We're not gonna rebrand it and put a new sticker on it and call it something else. We don't need it, right? It was built on a third-party API, it was built on a technology that every single person listening to this has in their pocket right now. You don't need it from us. And we're we we have way, way, way more important things to build for professionals, and that's where we're gonna focus now.

Gary Pageau 13:50

And do you think because Ivoto has such a positive reputation that that that's where the feelings are coming from? It hurts more because it's coming from a friend as opposed to something else. Because that was a lot of the you know, I've I've looked at the headlines, and the headlines are like betrayal, WTF, what's wrong with these people. And it's and it's because there's people who had a relationship with the company.

Jay Peterson 14:18

Very much so. Yeah.

Gary Pageau 14:19

Because I mean, no one really cares if there's the henshot generator out of Indonesia or someplace, they don't, you know, it's not a betrayal coming from them.

Jay Peterson 14:29

Exactly right. Yeah, I mean, you I couldn't have said it better myself. I think it's because we've got such a great relationship and we have such a strong piece of technology that that's why it struck a nerve so bad or so so aggressively with so many of our users and even non-users too, Gary. I mean, we there was a lot of people in the comments that are not paying customers, but they felt this because they've tried the system and maybe they didn't, you know, maybe they didn't decide to put their credit card down and and actually purchase a subscription or whatever the case is, but they're like, wow, this is such a powerful thing that I even feel compelled to come into the comment section and make, you know, make a note about this. Yeah, I think I'm I think the the reason that the nerve got hit on this is because so many photographers are using this as part of their day-to-day workflow. This is a mission critical piece of software for them to run their businesses, move fast, like get home to their families, not spend all night editing photos. And that's why I think there was such sensitivity in the industry, and rightfully so. I would have felt the exact same way. And candidly, when I learned about this whole thing, I felt the same way. I I remember learning about this in the middle of a trade show event that we were at and thinking about a lot of what our users were going to think and feel when the news broke about this thing, if the news even broke about it. And as you casually pointed out, betrayal and all these uh these gigantic bold-faced you know headlines about what happened. I mean, a lot, I think a lot of it has to do with you botas had sort of a, yeah, we've not been in the headlines for anything except positive news. And and this was the first negative thing that's ever come out. So it was, I think it was really underscored.

Gary Pageau 16:09

Yeah. I'm just curious as a business where you have to manage the customer-facing piece, right? What were the conversations back back to the home office about this? Were they getting this from other regions too? Or so this is a global phenomenon?

Jay Peterson 16:24

No, no, not so much a global phenomenon. This was this this was very much, I I can say with some degree of confidence, very much isolated to to North America in the US market. We we didn't really hear much chatter from from from the from the other territories or regions where we operate globally. And perhaps part of that, I mean, most a lot of our market is is over in in the greater parts of Asia too, and like Korea and Japan as an example. They, you know, they're accustomed to these things. They they've had these, I think they're more familiar with with these generative tools. And yeah, I mean, that's that's one part of it. Uh, the answer to the other part of your question is, you know, what so what what did some of our customers actually reach reach out to us with and and share? And honestly, the response was overwhelmingly positive from from a lot of the the operators that are very confident in their business. I'll I got a lot of phone calls from people going, hey, I just wanted to hear from you directly. What happened? And I'll explain the story and tell them full transparency what happened, like I shared with you. And then they go, I'm really not worried about it. You know, I'm my business is built on trust and relationships and great products. And these generative tools are not going to do anything to interrupt my business. They're going to help me in my business. Right. And I my job is to figure out how to how to take advantage of these new tools that come out. So I'm really not worried, but I wanted to talk to you and figure out what the real story was.

Gary Pageau 17:49

Because I think one of the things that the industry is wrestling with, just at a macro level, is this whole what's allowable in terms of a portrait, in terms of because we've been, you know, wrestling with that sort of idea since the early days of Photoshop. What can you do in a picture to keep it a picture versus an illustration? I think generative AI has sort of crossed that bridge as well. Where but on the other hand, like you said, the people who are really good at what they do as a photographer are really not they're capturing moments. They're they're they're leveraging authenticity, if you will. And maybe they're using a tool like Evoto to enhance that authenticity, to reinforce that message, not replace it.

Jay Peterson 18:38

Exactly. That you took the word out of my mouth. I was I was thinking of specifically the word authenticity as you were sharing with me. It that's that's exactly it. And this is why Evoto has become so prevalent and so widely adopted in in the industry, too. Is it's the authenticity part. I remember back in 2024, we heard a lot about, oh, is this face tune? Is this an alternative to face tune? Right? Remember that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in this, and then people, you know, a lot of people, you know, they got they got some credits, they played with the system, they they spent some time with Yvoto, and then they realized, oh, this is how I keep the authenticity part of photography, digital photography alive, and how I can differentiate myself because I'm able to move so quickly. This is this is something of like not just a time machine that where I can like move really quickly through my editing, but also I can keep that high degree of realism to my photos and not push it. Because everybody's had a bad experience using the FaceTune app at some point where it's like, okay, this doesn't this kind of looks like me, but it's not really me. Right. And this is this is not that. This is for professionals by professionals on for keeping genuine digital photography, um, how do I say, in the appropriate lane, I'll say.

Gary Pageau 19:54

Right.

Jay Peterson 19:54

Yeah.

Gary Pageau 19:55

There's a lot of hubbub out there right now. You know, when we're recording this, there's some industry issues in the volume market regarding high profile players who are getting backlashed over even alleged attachments to some controversial figures. And it's it's it's a big PR problem, right? What AI is because the end users, whether they're the casual photographers or who could be replaced by a headshot generator, because they're not very good, to consumers who don't understand what AI is, and they think that you know Epstein was looking at their kids' pictures on the Life Touch galleries, right? I mean, it's it's just so what kind of work do you think the industry needs to do as from an education standpoint to calm people down, if you will, because there's there's a lot of just I I'm gonna use the word stupidity. There's stupidity and stupid people have loud voices.

Jay Peterson 20:49

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I I'm I'm gonna respectfully agree with you. I think there it's it's easy to get work to up over certain things, topics like like this the look, school photography as a topic, if that's what we're talking about here. There's a lot of sense, nobody wants their children's photos to be accessible to anybody except the service provider and them, period, full stop, right? So a lot the answer to your question is that I think a lot of it, and this is a discussion that we need to have as the as the software providers in the industry that touch these things, that process these photos, we need to be, we need to offer transparency and make it easy to understand what's happening in simple terms, not in industry jargon that only a few of us are going to understand. That's it. That it's it's those types of things, the ISO certifications and SOC 2, and you know, all of these different things that you know the parents don't necessarily care about. And it makes it difficult for the photography service providers to explain to the parents. We need to make it easy for everybody to share with everybody about what actually happens with these photos, who is actually reviewing them, who isn't able to review them, and what happens to these photos after I get my print package mailed to my house. What happens to these photos? Right. I mean, this this is more of a conversation for the big photo, you know, the photo service providers to have, but for us on the software side, it's we're we are directly having those conversations with our customers who are the people behind those cameras. So it's yeah, it's very much top of mind right now, as you as you mentioned. Mentioned with all the news that's going on in the world. And a lot of this ties back to in the photo industry, we don't have an emphasis on good PR communications. And this is a whole other topic that a lot of us need to really, and myself included, with the whole AI headshot generator. We need to focus more time, effort, and energy into how we're communicating with the world, with everybody that that's looking at us.

Gary Pageau 22:45

Because there's a lot of confusion, like, you know, AI because when you hear things about, well, it's trained on pictures and everything else. And oh, the AI was trained on my kids' pictures, and it's well, probably not. Certainly not. Yeah. And and it's the other thing that's weird to me, just from the sort of the lack of education standpoint, there's certain other providers of imaging services like Google Photos or whatever, who are doing way more of that kind of stuff than little old e Voto and some and even LifeTouch and some of these other companies, right? They're doing way more invasive AI stuff.

Jay Peterson 23:24

Yeah, yeah, well, right, terms and conditions that most people aren't reading. So it's it's the devil you know, I suppose. It's yeah, I mean, to your point, it's it's one of those things where it's like it's you're choosing convenience over you know, fighting the, you know, being resistant to signing off on those T's and C's. And look, yeah, I mean, I can speak to e Voto specifically. Our position is we do local processing, we don't do any cloud processing. Everything with e Voto is local on the user's desktop and or on their local machine. We have a no-touch policy. We cannot review any user's photos, and we intend to keep it this way. We want to keep it this way for safety reasons, for continuity reasons, for transparency reasons. It's a lot easier for us. And also, Gary, like the enormous cost that would come with cloud processing and hosting our users. We're talking about, I don't even know, hundreds of millions, maybe several billions of images. We we're not gonna front the bill for hosting all those images in order to generate new models when we can do this by easily licensing photos or paying for photos from our users that volunteer them to us, which is how we always do things. We build things based on feedback. And then when we get that feedback, we have really, really lovely conversations with our users that go, Yeah, I'd love to have a you know straight hair removal function. Great. Can you send me some photos and we'll pay you for them? And they go, absolutely. There's a way to be trustworthy and to not overstep boundaries or or create weird dark gray areas or ambiguity in how you build your software tools. Right. And that's, I mean, that's been a big learning lesson from us. We we've been very fortunate that it was already architected this way. This was already the way that we did business. Right. And coming out of this whole AI headshot generator thing and all this controversy, thank goodness that this is already a part of our business model. Yeah. Thank goodness. Yeah. Yeah. We, I mean, we do everything very, I can say confidently now, especially in retrospect and having sat down literally face to face with the people involved and what happened with us, everything is is definitely ethical and definitely above board. And I wouldn't publicly say that if I felt any differently. We are we we've we've got our act together, and and um, we're again, we're in a very, very fortunate position.

Gary Pageau 25:40

The rest of it is, yeah, a lot of it is just public perception at this point, like you said, with well, and part of the problem you've got is you know, sadly, we do live in a culture and an environment where there are people, influencers, bloggers, thought leaders, in quotes, who benefit from generating this controversy, right? Because they're gonna get clicked views and whatnots from this. So for them to propagate and do a blog post about I feel betrayed, and I'm not singing anyone specifically, but it sort of looked like there was a lot of that where where you know there was where, you know, back 10-15 years ago, there wasn't that incentive where you'd have somebody who's quote, a thought leader, and they have to come up with content continuously, so they're looking for things to complain about. And and in part that's where this lifetouch scandal, if it's if you can call it that, is coming from. Somebody was looking for something to do, something, some connection they could make more of, and exploited it when you think about it. And again, I'm gonna defending Apollo and all those things, but you know, life touch is a very small portion of their portfolio, and no one's going ape because of StubHub is owned by Apollo, right?

Jay Peterson 26:57

Right, or any of the other, I don't know, hundreds of companies that they own in their portfolio, right? There nobody's going after these other companies. Yeah, I mean, all I can really say is, I mean, one of the big lessons that that I think that we learned coming out of our recent incident is the the public response. The PR response, number one, if it's written in legal ease, if it's all you know, the legal team drafted a response, it's gonna fall on deaf ears. Your customers, the people that are paying, you know, paying you guys and your loyal users are going to be, they're gonna be upset, they're gonna be frustrated because it's gonna, it's gonna it's gonna feel disingenuous and it's not gonna feel authentic. We learned, I learned that very quickly in the comment section. And then the second thing is you you really have to put a face to these things, which is why I've I've been on the phone and I've been trying to do as many interviews and have conversations as possible to represent the brand and show people that we really are, we are people. There are actual people that work at this company. You've seen us at the trade shows, but we're we really do work at this company and we really do care about what's going on and how you guys feel. And that's, I think the big, maybe a big lesson for for the folks at Life Touch right now is like they need they need to figure out a way to not just you know share public responses, but get in front of this thing in a meaningful way that matters to people. Like, like how Evoto builds based on feedback, you need to listen to the feedback from from the folks that are actually you know paying you and and care and care about your services. Right. And that's the I again, one of the huge lessons that I learned coming out of this this whole incident thing is hopefully nothing ever happens again. But it in you know, in the event that we do misstep or make another mistake in the future, I've got a better understanding of of how evoto can better respond to that incident in the future if it happens.

Gary Pageau 28:40

From an AI standpoint, just just pivot a little bit and talk because we're talking controversy. That's all the part that's gonna get clipped and everyone's gonna talk about. But I'm I'm a little concerned for people like yourself who have applications that you subscribe to. When in an AI world, maybe I can go to Chat GPT, drop in a picture and say, eyeglass removal, and do these things, and it's gonna call, it's gonna find a function or create the code and do it without even having an application. We could be heading towards a world where Photoshop goes away or Lightroom goes away, and well, Yevoto will be here forever because you always listen to your customers. But what are your kind of thoughts about this world we're going to, or maybe it's not even an application-ish world?

Jay Peterson 29:28

Million dollar question. I have two I have two thoughts about this. I have two maybe two different frames of mind about this. Number one is from a photography perspective and from like a post-production perspective, by uh by any means necessary. Whatever is going to help us move fast and like not have to sit in front of a monitor editing, we're we're about. And Evoto is is the very, very innovative company. We we like to move fast, as every all of our users know. We like to to innovate and and move as quickly as possible with with developing and rolling out new features and in and innovating or optimizing existing features. So I think that we're about it. I think I think that we're we're optimistic. We'll stay optimistic on that one. On the other hand, yeah, we what we we want to continue to make sp, we believe that there is space for everybody in the industry that wants to be a part of the photo or the photo editing industry. And and again, we're we're gonna move into video in the future too. And the same thing for video post-production as well, or video retouching, we'll call it. What a time to be alive. We'll see what happens with with yeah, with these new tools that exist, these age-dick tools where yeah. Well, I mean, I'll remain optimistic and yeah, I'll remain an optimist on this thing, but the it's a very interesting time, especially right now. I mean, we're we're talking right now February of 2026, and we've, you know, there's news breaking about all these new video generative tools that are creating ending scenes and new clips and movies that shouldn't exist. And right, I mean, what a time to be alive. I we can't possibly know what's gonna happen tomorrow or six months or a year from now, let alone five years from now. I think evota will we as an organization will continue to move fast and and innovate, and hopefully we'll we'll stick with the curve. But yeah, what an interesting time and technology to see what's going on, right?

Gary Pageau 31:18

Well, you can't top that summation. So, where can people go for more information about evoto and and yeah, test drive this beast or buy more credits or do something?

Jay Peterson 31:29

Sure. Yeah, easy enough. Easy enough. Evoto.ai is the website where you can download it. You can try it for free. It's free to download, free to use. We do offer test accounts or test trials, so you can you can actually get some free credits just for signing up for an account. Um, and you can check out all of the other evo products on the website as well. We've got Evoto Instant, Evoto Video, Evoto iPad, and some other tools that are also web-based editors that are on the product page.

Gary Pageau 31:56

Awesome. Well, thank you, Jane. Thanks for your candor and honesty. We do appreciate that. And look forward to seeing you soon at one of those mini trade shows that you attend.

Jay Peterson 32:06

Likewise. Likewise, Garrett. Great to see you. Thanks for having me on. I've been looking forward to this. Thanks.

Erin Manning 32:13

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