Editing Landscape Photos: How much is okay?
I don’t consider one of my images to be a “photograph” unless it depicts a scene that I actually saw.
These days, sometimes people will ask a landscape photographer: “do you use Photoshop?” And yes, of course, most landscape photographers do edit their photos, although it may be in other software. Some photographers will point out that even taking a photo on your phone is “processed”, entirely by algorithms and artificial intelligence, and there’s nothing wrong with doing more of the processing by hand. Sometimes the image is actually more realistic when processed by hand! Albert Dros has a really nice example in this article.
I think the question that people really mean to ask is: “are your images realistic depictions of what you saw?”. And for most great landscape photographers (which I am not), I think the answer is… mostly, but not entirely. If you were to look at the top 101 photos from the International Landscape Photographer of the Year contest, I’d guess that at least 95 of them have some editing that is artistic but not realistic.
Then there are also artists out there who make fully composite imagery, meaning that they take a bunch of photographs and blend them together to make beautiful, fictional, digital artwork. I really like Julius Kähkönen, AKA “Visuals of Julius”. Julius has some amazing photography too, but most of his images aren’t photographs, nor does he claim they are.
So, where does the line get drawn between “digital art” and “photography”? I feel the ILPOTY images are different than Julius’ work. Put another way: how much artistic editing until the image is no longer real, until it’s no longer a photograph? I want to explain my personal view here, both for people who see my images to understand how real they are, and because I think it captures one of three current norms of landscape photography, and yet I’ve never heard it described.
Morning in Greenland. The real scene was not as blue as this image. It was more of a “cool gray”, as you would see on a cloudy morning.
Before I describe my philosophy, I want to give two examples that will help explain it. This first image is from the fjords of Greenland. I think it shows some pretty clear artistic editing, making the image bluer, and yet I still consider it a “photograph”. And while I’m happy to talk about the editing here , I don’t feel the need to disclose it everywhere that I show the image.
But I also have a few images that I feel aren’t photographs, like this image below. Maybe it’s surprising that the person in the photo, photographer Rodrigo Viveros, is totally real and was actually in that spot in the composition! Completely accidentally. But, the mist in the scene is totally fake, if it wasn’t obvious.
Rodrigo Viveros, snow, ice, and mist in the Yukon. I don’t consider this a photograph, because the mist is entirely fake.
Scene Authenticity
My view is what I call “scene authenticity”. Repeating from the top of the post.
I don’t consider one of my images to be a “photograph” unless I saw the scene depicted by the image.
And to be clear, when one of my images no longer shows a real scene that I saw, I will disclose the editing alongside my image.
Okay, so,
“How do you define a scene?”
That’s a good, difficult question. I believe that a scene is the content that is portrayed by the image, which is sort of distinct from the artistic and stylistic choices of the image. In the earlier image from Greenland, every tangible thing in that image is real. The water is real, the rocks are real, the opening of the clouds in the distance is real. The color is different, but for that particular image, that color is an artistic element. In of itself, the color is not part of the scene.
Sometimes, though, the color is part of what defines a scene. We know that trees are in autumn when their leaves are red, yellow, or orange. So if we change green leaves to orange, we’re changing the scene. Similarly, if we change a blue sky to orange, we’re changing the daytime to sunset or sunrise.
Exactly what defines a scene is messy, and I don’t know that I could create a comprehensive set of rules, but I do my best to make that judgement for my own images, and I think that most of my viewers would make a similar judgement.
Why is this my rule?
Why does this question matter at all? For one thing, to me it feels dishonest to call myself a photographer, but to show images of things that I didn’t actually see.
So why even call myself a photographer? Why not just make pretty images as photo-composites and call myself a digital artist? Because I have a specific goal with my photography.
I want to inspire people to seek out the beauty of the world, especially the beauty of nature. With that goal in mind, a balance needs to be struck. An image that is stronger artistically, even if less realistic, can be more inspirational. But if you go too far in changing an image, then people may be disappointed that the real world is not as exceptional as the image. So the goal with my editing and my disclosure is to be in the middle: I want to inspire people as much as possible, while they can still feel confident that the beauty really exists out there in the world, beyond the image.
Occasionally, I just enjoy making an artistically beautiful image that isn’t real, so sometimes I do that and I tell people that’s what it is, because I don’t want to detract from my main goal.
What other kinds of changes do I make?
There are a lot of cases where my processing is more extreme than just changing the color temperature, and this is a good place for me to talk about some of those changes. In this recent image from Death Valley, with mud cracks and a spectacular sunset, I did something called a “time blend”.
Image from Death Valley with a “time blend”. The foreground and background were shot at different times, to best illustrate the three-dimensionality of the mud cracks.
The foreground mud cracks were actually photographed while the sun was above the mountains, while the background and sky were shot shortly after. I did this because the sun cast a soft light through the clouds onto the mud cracks. This light really illustrated the three-dimensionality of the cracks, and I wanted to show that while also showing the spectacular sunset we saw. Still, I think this “scene” is real - these are real mud cracks, real mountains, and a real sunset, that I all saw together in a single evening.
Sometimes I also do something that I call a “parallax blend”. I’ve never heard anyone else give it a name before. This photograph of sastrugi in the Yukon is my best example of it. Actually the photo from Death Valley above is both a time blend and a parallax blend, but I didn’t want to introduce two things at once.
Sastrugi in the Yukon with a “parallax blend” and a bit of warping. The foreground and background are taken from slightly different perspectives.
In the original image, half of the frozen lake was obscured by the snow in the foreground. So I replaced the background with a shot taken maybe 100 feet away, facing the same direction, that showed the entire lake. In other words, there wasn’t any real camera angle that arranged all these features as they appear in the image. This composition was physically impossible. However, everything you see in the scene was actually there: the patterns in the snow, the setting sun, the mountains, the river, and the lake. So despite being an impossible camera angle, I still feel this a real scene.
Many other photographers also do “focal length blends”, which are kind of like parallax blends in that they create impossible compositions without fundamentally changing the scene. I haven’t yet done this myself, but I have no objections to it, so it may show up in future images.
Those are the more extreme changes I make while still considering the images “photographs”. But I almost always make adjustments like selective contrast, color adjustments, dodging and burning (i.e. brightening or darkening parts of the image), and cloning out small features, like removing small rocks from an image.
Other Views
I want to be clear though: my philosophy isn’t a moral prescription. The only strong belief I have about processing is “don’t lie”. Don’t claim that an image wasn’t manipulated in a way that it was. But there are other perfectly valid philosophies of “how much editing is okay” for landscape photos. I’m not going to dive too deep into these, because others have, I just want to mention 2 other common views:
Emotional authenticity. Artists who take this view aren’t necessarily trying to depict a totally real scene, but are trying to capture their feelings while perceiving a real scene. Cath Simard is one amazing photographer who follows this view. Her words: “I am fascinated by the line between reality and fiction in relation to the emotional response the viewer has“.
Landscape permanence. Another common view is “anything that is impermanent within an image is fair game for editing“. In this view, changes to the sky, the atmosphere, lighting, and often even vegetation are okay, as long as the permanent parts of the landscape are unchanged, and as long as the final image could plausibly be taken. The legendary Marc Adamus is a famous practitioner of this view. Personally, even when my images stray outside of scene authenticity, like with the image of Rodrigo above, I always stick to landscape permanence - I never create fake places.
It’s worth pointing out that Marc and Cath have mostly the same goal as I do. They love the wilderness more than me, and they want to inspire others to see the beauty of it. We just have different opinions on the best way to do that. But they’re both honest about it! To me that’s much more important than our difference in opinion.