Lens-Artists Challenge #154 / 410 – One Photo Edited

Ritva hosts this weeks Lens-Artist Challenge and asks us to post images of the same picture edited in two different ways. Her original post can be found on this link: Lens-Artists Challenge #154 / 410 – One Photo Edited

I’m really struggling with this weeks challenge as I very rarely change an image that much in post processing. I was always told that you should try to frame and expose your images in camera, (this probably stems back to the days of film!). I’ve always subscribed to that view and try to get my images as I want them in camera. With modern mirrorless cameras the EVF has pretty much done away with widely incorrect exposed images. I do tweak with minor crops quite often.

However, that said, I think modern cameras and processing software, have made it easier than ever to crop heavily and manipulate images in post processing. My Fujifilm X-T5 has a 40.2 megapixel sensor which results in images that can be cropped really heavily in post and still produce a good size file for printing to a reasonable size. Without touching on Generative AI, modern software like Topaz can recover noisy/blurred images that a few years ago I would have immediately binned.

Next up are a couple of images where I’ve used Generative AI in Photoshop, to manipulate a crop that is the same size as the original image. I wanted to upload both images as stock so the vertical crop had to be the same size in pixels as the original, along the longest edge, to get through the stock agency quality control. Alamy were fine with contributors using Generative AI, as long as the fact that it had been used was added to the upload notes. I’ve used Generative AI to add more sky to the top of the original image to create my vertical version.

Personally I don’t think the crop makes for a better image. What it does do is give a picture editor more usable options for newspaper or magazine articles. Obviously the in house editors can do this themselves but, quite often searches for images are made with the preferred image orientation in the search terms. For example, with these images, I’m guessing it could look like ‘Cotswold, cottage, roof tiles, roofer, isolated, vertical etc.

My third example is using post processing software to create a completely different image from the original. A few years ago, I decided to take on my own photography project and photograph all the Wallace and Gromit sculptures displayed around Bristol. To be different I decided I wanted to record them all as Polaroid images. Although I own a polaroid camera, the cost of using that for the project was prohibitive. So, I decided to create my Polaroids in Photoshop using a Polaroid Generator Action. It worked really well and here’s an example of the action used on an image of my favourite sculpture.

I’m going to leave my post there and thank Ritva for hosting this weeks challenge. Thank you to everyone who posted for my challenge last week and for all the kind comments I received. I read every blog I could find using the pingbacks and Lens-Artists tag. Apologies to anyone I missed. I was surprised how many Lens-Artists posts I don’t normally see, as they don’t appear in the tag search in the Jetpack reader. I had a good insight into just how hard the Lens-Artists team work to bring us these weekly challenges. I take my hat off to them all.

Finally I’m in the process of moving my hosting from wordpress.com to Fasthosts here in the UK. I wanted to make use of plugins to modernise my site and WordPress.com are too expensive for that option for my blog hosting needs. So this is my first live post from the new site. If you do read this outside of the Jetpack reader, you might find yourself on my nearly finished site, but it does currently contain no other posts other than test uploads for the new layout. I’ll be moving everything over from the old site and moving the old domain name once I’m happy with the new design.

All images: ©Stephen Hyde 2007-2026 – All rights reserved.