Aftershoot launches Photon, a free RAW editor built to teach you how to edit

Sponsored by Klovera

A broad cartoon man with a sandwich and a flask leads today. The four clips each stop on one picture: that wide-eyed dad, a glowing axe in red fog, a giant splitting a stone, three matching men at a laptop. Aftershoot heads the news with Photon, a free RAW editor that also teaches. The Secret is retainers: clients renew a job you take off their plate, not a stack of videos. That is the line between a gig and a business. Into Trending.

📈 Trending

All four clips stop you with one picture before anything moves: a wide-eyed cartoon man, an axe in red fog, a giant prising a stone apart, three matching men at a laptop. None needs a caption to read; the frame does the hook.

1. Cartoon dad, sandwich in hand, fully charged

▶ Watch on Instagram · @rudenko.aivideo

A broad, bearded man in a dark blazer stands on a suburban street at sunrise, a wrapped sandwich in one hand and a coffee flask in the other, eyes wide. The caption, Заряд 100%, translates as Charge 100%. It is from @rudenko.aivideo, in a glossy 3D-animation look, and rests on that one startled, fed, caffeinated expression.

📈 673,292 views — 30× the account's median

Why it works:

• Open on the eyes. A wide-eyed stare in a tidy suburban frame asks a question the viewer stays to answer.
• Give the character props. A sandwich and a flask tell you his whole morning in one glance, no dialogue.
• Keep the style consistent. The clean animation look reads as a film still, so people assume quality before judging it.

2. A glowing axe planted in red fog, test seven

▶ Watch on Instagram · @voidztar

An axe stands upright in cracked ground, its curved blade edged in white light with a teal core, against a wall of red fog. This is Testing #7 from @voidztar's Citizen Red serial: Val was meant to throw Hatch the axe and slice a red polar bear in half. The maker liked this result better and asks what viewers think of Hatch.

📈 82,915 views — 24× the account's median

Why it works:

• Show the test, not the polish. Labelling it Testing #7 invites viewers into the process, and people stay for work in progress.
• Name the weapon. An axe called Hatch becomes a character, and viewers can hold an opinion on a character.
• Ask the audience a question. Ending the caption on a question turns viewers into commenters, and comments push the clip further.

3. A giant splits a white stone block by hand

▶ Watch on Instagram · @xstonedape

A huge bare-backed man in a loincloth stands at the base of a towering white stone block and pulls it apart along a crack running top to bottom. A crowd in rough ancient dress watches from below, scaffolding either side, under a hard blue sky. It is from @xstonedape, captioned Cutting of the Stone, and looks like a frame from an old epic.

📈 37,754 views — 4× the account's median

Why it works:

• Put scale in the frame. A crowd at his feet tells you how big the stone is faster than any caption.
• Borrow the look of old film. Grainy daylight and period costume read as something shot decades ago, so people lean in to check.
• Make the action one act. Splitting one stone is a single, legible task, and viewers wait to see it finish.

4. Kling 4.0 puts three Spider-Men behind one laptop

▶ Watch on Instagram · @yapayzekaserisi

Three men in matching red Spider-Man hoodies and black sunglasses crowd a white table in a bare studio: one at a small keyboard with headphones round his neck, one pointing at the laptop, the third watching. The caption bills them as DJ Tom, MC Tobey and Andrew. It is by @yapayzekaserisi and credited to Kling 4.0.

📈 2,337,400 views — 1.9× the account's median

Why it works:

• Stack three versions of one thing. Three takes on the same character side by side is a comparison joke that lands instantly.
• Strip the set bare. A white studio and one table leave nothing to look at but faces and costumes.
• Give them a job to do. A DJ set has a rhythm, so the clip has somewhere to go once the joke lands.

Try this on your next idea: Freeze your opening frame and ask whether it would stop a thumb with the sound off.

🤖 News & Updates

Aftershoot launches Photon, a free RAW editor that teaches you to edit

Aftershoot, the company behind an AI-driven photo editing platform for pros, has launched Photon, its own RAW editor, and it is free. The pitch is not only that it edits RAW files but that it teaches you how to edit photos. The announcement is short: no platform list, no paid tier, no catch spelled out. If you shoot product stills to seed your video generations, this matters because a free pro-grade RAW editor lowers the cost of a clean source frame.

A 4-step MiniMax-H3 LoRA lands in ComfyUI format, broken versions pulled

A ComfyUI-ready 4-step LoRA for MiniMax-H3-33B, a small add-on file that lets the model render in four steps, is trending. It was distilled from H3 with Projected Distribution Matching Distillation at rank 128 and covers all 50 transformer blocks. The catch: earlier uploads were broken conversions whose keys silently did nothing in the ComfyUI loader, and they have been removed. If you run H3 locally in ComfyUI, this matters because four steps instead of a full run cuts render time hard.

Gemini Nano Banana 2.1 goes GA with 8:1 panoramas and better character consistency

Google's release notes list Gemini Nano Banana 2.1 as generally available. It updates Nano Banana 2, keeps Flash-level speed and cost, and claims better visual quality, prompt adherence, character consistency across turns and text rendering, plus wide ratios of 1:4, 4:1, 1:8 and 8:1 at 1K, 2K and 4K. The older gemini-3.1-flash-image is deprecated with no shutdown date given. If you build product scenes in multi-turn edits, this matters because consistency across turns keeps a mascot looking like itself.

🤫 The Daily Secret

Retainers: what clients pay for monthly

Most of the AI video people I talk to sell the same way: a project, a price, an invoice, then silence until the client needs something else. The ones who sleep well sell a month, not a video. The question I get most is not about prompts; it is how do I stop starting from zero every month. The answer is a retainer, and the retainer that gets renewed is never ten videos a month. It is a job the client has stopped having to think about.

That is the lesson for your own business. Clients do not pay monthly for output. They pay monthly for a problem that has stopped being theirs. A shop owner does not want twelve clips. They want the ad account fed, hooks refreshed before they tire, and losers paused without a meeting. Price the job, not the files. Frame it as keeping their paid social fed and tested and a monthly fee makes sense. Frame it as a bundle of videos and they will count them and ask for a discount.

“Make something people want.” — Paul Graham

See you inside.
— Lauren

Published by Internet Mastery