Is It Wrong to Edit Your Landscape Photos?

You crest the brow of a hill to behold a magnificent landscape, but as you’re framing it in your camera’s viewfinder, you realize that this stunning scene is intersected by ugly power lines. Is editing them out later in Photoshop an option you would consider, or one that feels somehow dishonest?

There are contexts in which editing or manipulating a photograph after the fact would certainly be considered wrong and possibly even fraudulent or illegal. Beyond certain specialized domains such as crime scene photography and photojournalism, however, this issue is rarely so cut and dried. Even in the more artistic areas of photography, though, image manipulation can sometimes get you into trouble. Photography competitions often operate under strict rules that prohibit any post-production manipulation of submitted entries, and some photographers have even found themselves on the sharp end of these rules—getting disqualified and forfeiting their prize, for example, for something as apparently innocent as editing the skin on an elephant’s ear.

In general, though, when we’re out shooting for ourselves or even shooting with a view to selling our images, we are not bound by any such set of defined rules about whether it’s okay to edit or manipulate our photographs in post-production. In most cases, this is a decision that must be made between the photographer, their artistic sensibility, and their conscience.

If we use the example of the kind of artistic landscape photography that is featured in the video presented here, you would have to ask yourself whether the person buying a landscape print has the expectation that it will faithfully reproduce every detail that was actually present in the depicted landscape at the moment the photograph was captured. If they are buying the print purely to enjoy the beauty of the scene, are they going to mind that you edited out some trash that somebody left in the foreground of the shot, in order to remove a feature that might visually distract from that beauty? What about editing out more permanent features of the landscape, such as power lines or buildings?

Thomas Heaton is an excellent landscape photographer who produces beautiful work. He is also a very thoughtful photographer who clearly cares deeply about his craft, and this comes across in all of his videos. In this latest video, Thomas struggles with the question of whether it is right or ethical to edit your landscape photographs in post-production, to remove features that you feel might detract from the beauty of the scene. As an added bonus, another excellent photographer - Fstopper’s own Darren Spoonley - is also featured in this video as he accompanies Thomas on his hike through some of Ireland’s breathtaking scenery in search of the perfect landscape shot.