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from a photograph to an image

grandmas
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p.3 #1 · from a photograph to an image

Totally AI generated images are not copyrightable as I understand it, in case anyone is interested. I can see where this might become a problem in the future.

Jan 08, 2026 at 05:11 PM

gwaww
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p.3 #2 · from a photograph to an image

I too, spent much time years ago manipulating images in my darkroom. I always enjoyed that. To me, a photo was not done until it is printed. I like to explore post-processing options and really don�t mind if they are manipulated a bit. But,I am very concerned about the possibility of misrepresentation or deliberate dishonesty.

Jan 08, 2026 at 06:18 PM

dakel
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p.3 #3 · from a photograph to an image

Imagemaster wrote:
Many alter their RAW photographs to images that may be slightly different, to ones that may be radically different. It can be from subtle adjustments to color, white-balance, contrast, sharpness, etc., etc. It can also be just removing small spots by cloning, to removing large objects than one would not prefer to see in the images. Do any of these changes mean those photographs are no longer photos, but now images?

Your question sounds rhetorical to me but I'll offer my opinion. I'm more of a photo purist so my imperfect definition is that a photo is captured by a lens rendering a scene onto film or a sensor. If after post capture manipulation the image remains recognizable to the captured scene, then it remains a photo. Make exposure changes, convert to black and white, clone stamp small items, add saturation and vibrance etc etc. Have at it and it still remains a photo to me. Replace a sky, nope. Replace a fence - nope. Replace a power line like in your image, nope. If I want to hang a photo of a hawk on my wall, then I would shoot at another location, another day and so on or purchase one from a photographer I admire. If I wanted to hang a hawk image on my wall, sure I'd use AI print it out. But that's not what I want to do. Images in my gallery or on my wall bring back memories of being in the field, of the place and of the experience.

The owners of photographs can make whatever changes they want as long as they are not violating any laws or rules in effect where such photos are posted or published. Just as you may alter a photo with minor cloning, who is to say you can't make major changes and even use AI to make an end product that appeals to yourself or anyone else?

Nobody. Do what you want. Just be open about it. I have a friend. We shot together one day. Later he called me to say he replaced the sky in his image and asked me not to mention it on socials. He can do whatever he wants with his imagery but that's not me.
You do you.

Jan 08, 2026 at 07:05 PM

Chris S.
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p.3 #4 · from a photograph to an image

Has anyone else noticed how many toes the AI hawk has? I count five--not the four that real birds have. For some hawks (e.g. Cooper's and sharp-shinned), foot/leg shapes are key differentiators, so important elements of an image.

The OP submits that his AI alteration is acceptable--similar to traditional photographic choices we've long grown accustomed to--if the resultant image is more pleasing to the viewer. No doubt some AI alterations fit this model--noise reduction, for example, can be constrained to easily fit within most viewer's understanding and acceptance window.

But I'd submit that adding extra toes to a bird should strike many of us as unacceptable slop. To me, so does the reduced leg length of this hawk (which may create species confusion), the altered tendons of the foot (which resemble nothing in the real world), and clearly implausible skin surface. AI made this stuff up, and on this bird it's as ridiculous as an elephant's trunk.

It is a problem with AI--not a feature--that only knowledgeable people will recognize some such errors, and other folk will use images like this to falsely learn what reality should look like.

It's especially alarming that these AI errors made it by the OP, who is an experienced bird photographer. What hope for less experience others?

AI, like any innovation in photography, will have to be experimented with and negotiated about until we settle on how to best use it and disclose its use. We can use conversations like this to argue pointlessly, or to move forward toward standards that help us all.

I'd submit that in this case, the AI work created visual misinformation and represents a "not acceptable" case for most uses. But acceptable cases are out there, and we can use threads like this to help us learn to steer AI into them for those who wish to use it.

Jan 09, 2026 at 12:40 AM

Imagemaster
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p.3 #5 · from a photograph to an image

Blah, blah, blah.

It is a rough example of altering a photo with AI. Want a more realistic rendition go look at someone's work that is an expert at AI, not my amateurish example. So alarming that I did such a shoddy job on my rough rendition. Maybe take a look at AI examples where those more expert than you can't tell the difference between a real photo of a hawk and an AI version. If you believe such images don't exist that is not my problem.

And of course if one has an image of a hawk hanging on a wall, one should expect viewers to inspect it with a magnifying glass.

Try doing your research on hawk talons so you can learn that this is a Polydactyly Hawk that has five talons. Images of a hawk with this condition have been shared on social media, with observers noting the unique appearance of the extra "talon".

Try and move forward.

Jan 09, 2026 at 02:06 AM

Alan4color
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p.3 #6 · from a photograph to an image

to paraphrase Bob Dylan

The tools they are a-changin...

Jan 09, 2026 at 07:24 AM

chez
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p.3 #7 · from a photograph to an image

Alan4color wrote:
to paraphrase Bob Dylan

The tools they are a-changin...

And then there is another known statement.

Just because you can does not mean you should.

Jan 09, 2026 at 08:57 AM

gdanmitchell
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p.3 #8 · from a photograph to an image

dakel wrote:
Replace a power line like in your image, nope.

That is in direct conflict with the traditions of photography. People have removed things from photographs since photography has existed. Go back and read my note about Ansel and the Lone Pine photo, a print that no one would say is �not a photograph.�

Here�s a hypothetical for you.

There�s a lovely scene, but unfortunately there is half of a rotting sandwich in it. You decide it should not be there. There are several things you could do.

1. Wait until the sandwich fully rots on its own annd disappears and only then capture the scene.

2. Step into the scene and remove it yourself.

3. Wait for someone else to walk by, notice the sandwich, and remove it to the trash unprompted.

4. Ask your assistant to remove it.

5. Ask a random stranger wandering by if they would please remove it. (�If only someone would remove this meddlesome sandwich��)

6. Make the exposure and burn it down in post (� la Ansel) so that it is no longer visible.

6. Manually clone it out and replace it manually with something else in the scene.

7. Use an AI cloning tool to replace it with an approximation of what is beneath the sandwich.

At some point this all starts to be angels-on-the-head-of-pins counting, and absolute �rules� about what you can and cannot do and still call a thing a photograph start to be untenable. (Is it never OK to change anything in any photograph? Is it OK to change it but not digitally? Is there a percentage of the image that can be changed without crossing the threshold? Is it OK to change a minor element but not a major one? What is the difference? And on and on�)

While I know that a thing that emerges from a Polaroid is a photograph and that a baloney sandwich is not, the gray areas in the middle are essentially impossible to definitively categorize objectively.

But have fun trying!

(And, no, this doesn�t mean �anything goes.�)

Edited on Jan 10, 2026 at 11:27 AM · View previous versions

Jan 09, 2026 at 01:43 PM

RoamingScott
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p.3 #9 · from a photograph to an image

Imagemaster wrote:
Blah, blah, blah.

You have summed up your 50,000 posts very succinctly, bravo!!

I had to laugh at the sycophantic applause this image received on the presentation side of the house. What a low bar we have set here for ourselves.

Jan 09, 2026 at 01:50 PM

Imagemaster
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p.3 #10 · from a photograph to an image

RoamingScott wrote:
You have summed up your 50,000 posts very succinctly, bravo!!

I had to laugh at the sycophantic applause this image received on the presentation side of the house. What a low bar we have set here for ourselves.

And here you are crawling out from under your rock again as one of the top low-bar contributors.

You just can't resist coming back to this thread can you?

Jan 09, 2026 at 01:57 PM

ruthenium
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p.3 #11 · from a photograph to an image

Some observations:
The development of photography and high-quality printing had no adverse effect on the painted art. Paintings are arguably more popular today than before, and the value of paintings by true masters has been increasing.

The wide-spread production of adulterated food has worked to increase the appreciation and value of good quality food (why I personally enjoy spending time in Japan where the food tastes better on average than in the Western hemisphere).

Therefore, I expect that the advance and widespread use of AI to create fully or largly artificial images is going to increase the value and appreciation of the work of photography masters who print and/or post photographic images that have no added AI-generated content.

If someone has this inspiration, naive perhaps, to have their photos remembered in 100 years from now, I believe it is best to conscientiously avoid AI-assisted content replacement in their photos. I believe that the authenticity of the photos taken today will matter everything for the future generations (tentatively assuming that the human civilization wouldn't come to an end prematurely, in our lifetime). Whether the authentic photos look or don't look "nice" wouldn't mean a thing, very much like our interest today in photos taken 100 years ago is unaffected by the technical quality of the old photos.

Jan 09, 2026 at 09:25 PM

chez
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p.3 #12 · from a photograph to an image

Jan 09, 2026 at 09:51 PM

RustyBug
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p.3 #13 · from a photograph to an image

ruthenium wrote:
Some observations:
The development of photography and high-quality printing had no adverse effect on the painted art. Paintings are arguably more popular today than before, and the value of paintings by true masters has been increasing.

The wide-spread production of adulterated food has worked to increase the appreciation and value of good quality food (why I personally enjoy spending time in Japan where the food tastes better on average than in the Western hemisphere).

Therefore, I expect that the advance and widespread use of AI to create fully or largly artificial images is going to increase the value and appreciation of the work...Show more →

I was thinking a very similar thing earlier today. A slightly different perspective of saying the same thing, maybe.

I recall in my early days with photography, asking about the valuation difference between photographs vs. paintings, and there was often some form of "it's easier" (inferring, no fine discipline of effort, training, etc.) to push a button than paint with a brush.

Historically, the "difficulty factor" of working in a given medium ... watercolor vs. oil vs. acrylic ... bronze / marble vs. clay, have had some degree of influence in the appreciation, etc. Granted, it isn't a sole contributor and there are plenty of other factors involved.

But, there has been a trend in the relative "ease" being valued differently. That said ... fast forward to where there are billions and trillions of AI generated images, being created by everyone from two year olds to 102 year olds, by simply talking into their phone.

On one hand, the "need" to have a photographer create an image of your choosing will be transformed into something different from years gone by. That (imo) is inevitable. OTOH, capturing actual events will still require a photographer, moreover than an AI generator. Although, I'm quite certain that folks will put video on a tripod and then upload it into AI and voila, etc. So, there'll be no escaping it to some degree.

The point of that then being that those who do continue to pursue and excel in our beloved genuine discipline will (down the road) then be seen as working in the "more challenging" medium, than the keyboard kids with AI and a cell phone, who can learn to "speak it into existence". So easy a caveman can do it (ode to Geico),

If we thought the automation of AF and AE diminished the value of difficulty / ease factor ... the use of AI is going to be an exponentially quantum leap beyond that. Not unlike how folks with the big brick cell phones were exceptional 20 years ago, and now the cell phone is a birthright, of sorts. AI will be so ubiquitous, it will supersede any of the "advances" (in terms of content creation volume) like a supernova vs. a match stick.

Imo, it won't diminish the value of photography (long term) ... although there will be a dip of perceived value relative to the need for photography to fill the function of producing images. Rather, it will (in time) substantiate those who didn't abandon the mastery of photography as an art form.

The cell phone trumped the volume of images made by "cameras" ... AI is the next iteration. Check back to this thread, 10 years from now. It wasn't that long ago, that we were pondering the next 10 years (bringing us to today) of what the future would be. We've got a window into what's coming down the road now ... different from what we could see from our vantage point 10 years prior. 20 years, 30 years, hmmm ...

That said ... I'll still be pressing the shutter button for a while, yet.

YMMV

Jan 09, 2026 at 10:07 PM

ruthenium
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p.3 #14 · from a photograph to an image

chez wrote:
You are assuming one can tell the difference between AI images and traditional photographic images. I�m not sure this will be doable in a few years. Maybe some way to verify an image is AI generated will be implemented that verifies an image is traditional photography or an AI derived image.

It is reasonable to expect that there must be an increasing need to differentiate authentic photos from AI created images, already in the near future. Thus, it is reasonable to expect the development of methods that would be able to detect AI content. I am not sure if there might be something at the pixel level that can reveal a difference. Replacing a part in a digital photo by AI content means, perhaps, some noticeable at the pixel level "unnatural" transition. I shouldn't speculate, but I have no doubt that different computerized methods of authentication of digital photographic images are going to be developed in the very near future. Some of these methods are going to be more sophisticated, some less. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few years I would be able to use an app from Apple/Play store to assess whether an image has AI generated content.

Jan 10, 2026 at 08:39 AM

ruthenium
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p.3 #15 · from a photograph to an image

Re @RustyBug@, quote "I recall in my early days with photography, asking about the valuation difference between photographs vs. paintings, and there was often some form of "it's easier" (inferring, no fine discipline of effort, training, etc.) to push a button than paint with a brush."

Without any intent to say something contradictory, my immediate thought on this is that pushing this button generates trivial and unremarkable photos 999999 times out of a million pushes, on average. Maybe even a greater percentage. If I could obtain a remarkable photo every time I press the shutter, I would've been a Leonardo da Vinci of photography.
What I mean to say is nothing original: that capturing and processing a truly outstanding great photographic image, that can rival (in terms of attention from an audience) some of the appreciated painted art, is an achievement of significant value that has nothing to do with the ease of pressing the shutter.

Like you, I shall be "pressing the button for a while, yet", and somewhere deep in me is the hope that as I keep pressing, maybe, I shall learn the "easy" craft of photography.

Jan 10, 2026 at 09:13 AM

dakel
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p.3 #16 · from a photograph to an image

dakel wrote:
Replace a power line like in your image, nope.

There�s a lovely scene, but unfortunately there is half of a rotting sandwich in it. You decide it should not be there. There are several things you could do.

I did say I was okay with cloning out small parts of an image. I also clearly stated it was my opinion. So not a dogma on what is or isn't a photo. For me, as a landscape photographer who enjoys finding beauty in nature, if there's a powerline in my photo, I won't take it or I will find a composition where the landscape, be it a tree branch or ground line, might obscure that power line. Or I may take it power-line and all with the theme of man's impact on nature. If you want to remove a power-line from you nature photos I would not criticize that.

On a more important note I slept through my alarm this morning and missed my planned sunrise shoot. Damn.

Jan 10, 2026 at 02:00 PM

gdanmitchell
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p.3 #17 · from a photograph to an image

dakel wrote:
On a more important note I slept through my alarm this morning and missed my planned sunrise shoot. Damn.

Heh. Been there, done that. (Though usually when I have a _really_ early alarm set for that I simply can't sleep well and I spend half of the night awake!)

BTW, my list of hypotheticals was not aimed at any post in particular, but more at the general idea that there are clear black and white lines between OK and non OK in photography.

For me, in the end part of it comes down to a matter of honesty. There are a few aspects to this.

One bright line for me in virtually all cases is that I won't do something in a photograph that I would not cop to if someone asked me about it. There are occasions when I crop out a power line, eliminate a branch, clone out a bright spot leaking through a grove of trees, eliminate a bird doing something distracting (like sticking its wing into the edge of the frame), and so on. It might surprise some of the supposed "purists" that some of my "most pure looking" photographs required a whole lot of post-processing to look that way. (I've also had folks accuse me of doing some kind of inappropriate post-processing on photographs that were barely fine-tuned at all.)

Another has to do with intent. This one can get a bit tricky, and there are two flavors of it.

1. I've encountered some photographers (As I write this I'm thinking of one who operated a large and impressive gallery in a heavily traveled location in a major American city.) who make an explicit claim that their photographs are "pure," often with the obvious implication (or direct claim) that this makes them superior to other lesser photographers... and they are presenting the subject "just as they found it" with no post-processing... and I can see that this is obviously not the case when I look at their prints. It is the combination of the claim of "purity" with the obvious reality that they are making it up that gets to me.

2. What is tricker is when the photographer doesn't make an explicit claim (as in #1 above) but there is what I think of as an "implicit claim" that what we are seeing is the subject as they saw it in the field. In this case, the success of the image depends on the innocence of viewers who believe the images represent "the real" and a photographer who plays along with and counts on their misunderstanding. I see this quite a bit with things like some of the Milky Way photographs, and we used to see it with photographs including the moon, but it also happens with amped up landscapes of all sorts.

To be clear, I am not at all averse to the use of extensive post-processing. In fact, I consider this fundamental to producing excellent images, just as I regard editing as being important to writing or interpretation as important in the performance of musical scores. I'm very skeptical of are those who make blanket, simplistic statements along the lines of "cloning is unethical" and so forth as if it were that simple.

Stepping down from soap box... ;-)

Edited on Jan 11, 2026 at 10:52 AM · View previous versions

Jan 10, 2026 at 03:47 PM

Camperjim
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p.3 #18 · from a photograph to an image

ruthenium wrote:
Some observations:
The development of photography and high-quality printing had no adverse effect on the painted art...........

Perhaps this is a bit off topic, but this is incorrect. Photography greatly changed painting.

For centuries many paintings, in the Western world at least, were commissioned by the churches to show depictions of gods, saints, and to tell religious stories. Paintings commissioned and displayed outside of the churches were very often portraits of the wealthy. Religious art declined for a lot of reasons, but photography clearly killed painted portraiture. That happened about the 1850s as photography became more available. Landscapes, nature, still lifes, and other forms of painting also changed rapidly. Realistic landscapes were soon replaced by impressionism followed soon afterwards by a whole host of non-representational styles such as fauvism, cubism, abstract expressionism......

We do still see some realism in paintings. Most of that is from new painters or from painters appealing to the general public where there is the belief that realistic paintings show great skill. Anyway, the art world has long since moved on and the stimulus was photography.

In the past painters were considered to be skilled craftsmen. Photography also help change that and painters became artists.

Jan 10, 2026 at 08:24 PM

Imagemaster
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p.3 #19 · from a photograph to an image

For centuries painters enhanced and made changes to the subjects they painted. If an ugly dictator ordered you to paint his portrait, you had better make his portrait look more handsome than he really was or you could suffer serious repercussions.

Painters have been using the original AI (Artist's Intelligence) for eons. Galleries and homes have loads of 'distorted' styles of paintings. How many photos of a Campbell's Soup do you think you could sell compared to Warhol's series of 32 of the same subject?

Jan 11, 2026 at 12:28 AM

gdanmitchell
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p.3 #20 · from a photograph to an image

Camperjim wrote:
Perhaps this is a bit off topic, but this is incorrect. Photography greatly changed painting.

For centuries many paintings, in the Western world at least, were commissioned by the churches to show depictions of gods, saints, and to tell religious stories. Paintings commissioned and displayed outside of the churches were very often portraits of the wealthy. Religious art declined for a lot of reasons, but photography clearly killed painted portraiture. That happened about the 1850s as photography became more available. Landscapes, nature, still lifes, and other forms of painting also changed rapidly. Realistic landscapes were soon replaced by impressionism followed soon...Show more →

Thanks for that!

I used to use Impressionism to show my students what happened to painting in the period when photography began to take hold. Photography (invented in the late 1830s) promised to make the formerly incredible complex and sophisticated skills of realistic portrayal irrelevant ��with the camera the photographer did not have to spend years studying and mastering all of the complex skills that were required to paint reality.

It must have been hugely disorienting for painters. So the question may have become, �what can a painting show that a photograph does not.� That was no longer the objective reality of things, but instead it was their subjective qualities and the artist�s response to those. So realistic paining was largely left behind (though it is a little more complicated than that) and painting headed off in all sorts of interesting directions that did not rely on realistic surface depiction any more.

(In the long run, it isn�t quite so clear cut. For example, pictorialist photographers aspired to produce the subjective qualities seen in paintings, and many painters were affected by what they saw in photographs � things like wide angle perspectives and depth of field, etc. And later non-photographer artists came to regard photographic materials and processes as just another visual tool rather then something separate from the rest of �art.�)

Jan 11, 2026 at 11:00 AM

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