Should photographers disclose AI editing?

Photography software now uses AI for all sorts of everyday jobs, and that doesn't mean every shot needs a warning underneath it. What matters is whether the software worked on what the camera recorded or added something that wasn't there.

21 August 20268 minute read

Nick Snow brings his JP5 in for an evening landing at Southend

Denoise, subject masks, sky selection, sharpening: if you've opened an editor in the last couple of years, you've already used AI on your photos, probably several times, and it never crossed your mind to declare it. That's fine. The trouble is that one word now covers both the tool that cleaned the noise out of a dark file and the tool that can put a subject into a shot that never had one, and arguing about two very different things with one word gets nowhere. So it helps to split the word first.

When should a photographer disclose AI editing?

Sorting tools into AI and not-AI doesn't work any more, as nearly every editor has AI in it somewhere and there's more with every update. It's more useful to look at what the software did to the shot:

Processing. Working with what the camera recorded: denoise, masking, exposure, colour, sharpening, focus stacking and similar tools.
Generation. Adding visual information that wasn't there: generated subjects, extended scenes, replaced skies or fully synthetic images.

If the final shot contains something that wasn't in front of the camera, say so, in plain words, somewhere people will see it. If it doesn't, you don't owe anybody a list of the tools you used, and we'd push back on anyone who says you do. A rule that makes you declare denoise gets ignored within a month, and after that nobody trusts any of the labels. If a competition, publication or client has stricter rules, theirs win, whether or not they seem reasonable to you.

Processing versus generation

Processing

Everything on this list works on what the sensor already recorded:

denoise
sharpening
masking
selective exposure
colour work
perspective correction
dust spot removal
focus stacking
exposure blending

Some of these tools have been around for decades and some still feel a bit like magic, but they're doing the same kind of job. A dust spot removed with a healing brush and a dust spot removed by something with AI on the label give you the same shot, and neither tells anybody anything untrue. Labelling these just trains people to scroll past labels, including the ones that matter.

Generation

Everything on this list puts something into the shot that the camera never saw:

adding a subject
extending the scene with generated detail
replacing a sky
creating a fully synthetic image

Once a shot contains something that was never there, it can't tell you what was in front of the camera any more, and that's the thing photography is best at. So say so. That goes whether or not the result is any good (plenty of generated work is interesting), and saying it isn't an apology. People just deserve to know which of the two they're looking at.

A Typhoon silhouetted in black and white beneath a full moon, with faint blue formation lights on the airframe. — Steven Wilson added the formation lights and the moon to this shot of Dragon 01 and said so in his caption, along with the black and white conversion and the blue and green colour pop. It has an Edit Reveal on Kōlab too, so you can see what he started with.

The awkward middle

Some tools sit right on the line. Generative upscaling invents fine detail by definition. Heavy denoise can get close to painting, and removing a distracting object changes the recorded scene, even though photographers have done exactly that with clone tools since long before anyone called it AI. No single rule covers all of that neatly.

The genre matters more than the tool. Taking a bin out of a landscape you shot for yourself (the council put it there, not you) isn't the same as taking an animal out of a wildlife shot, and the second is a problem even with identical software. So the line moves, and it'll keep moving as the tools change. It's still worth drawing one, even if you have to redraw it every few years.

A practical test

Would somebody who stood there recognise this as what happened? If yes, you're probably still in normal editing territory. If no, say what changed.

A fighter jet climbing away into an orange sunset sky, in silhouette with both afterburners glowing — Ryan Wata's Summer Nights. Rich colour and deep shadows are processing decisions, and on their own they don't change what happened.

Context matters

All of this goes out of the window the moment you enter a competition, file editorial work or deliver to a client. Read their rules, and read them before you edit rather than after. A personal shot has lots of freedom, a news photograph claiming to document an event has almost none, and wildlife competitions are strict about anything touching behaviour or the integrity of the scene (rightly so). The rules are changing fast too, so whatever you remember from two years ago is probably out of date. The rules attached to the actual use of a shot matter far more than whatever the internet decided last week.

How to disclose it without writing an essay

Disclosure sounds like it needs a paragraph of hedging. It's one line, and being specific matters more than being thorough:

"Sky replaced."
"Two people removed from the bottom left."
"Composite from two exposures ten minutes apart."
"Generated, not photographed."

Each of those tells people something they couldn't know otherwise, in fewer words than most lens names. A generic "AI assisted" badge tells them nothing, as it puts denoise and a generated background in the same bucket. People learn to ignore labels like that, and then they miss the one that mattered.

A line of Cold War jets parked at a museum, in black and white with the red and white checkerboard markings left in colour. — Cold War Guardians by Steven Wilson, taken at the Polish Aviation Museum in Krakow. His caption covers it in six words: "Foreground and background replaced in photoshop." Nobody has to guess, and that's all disclosure needs to do.

Showing the process helps

Kōlab's Edit Reveal puts the starting shot behind the final version, so anybody can drag between the two and watch the edit happen. That's most of the argument in why before and after is the fastest way to learn editing. It isn't proof of anything. There's no signature involved, it doesn't replace provenance standards or metadata, and a determined liar can put up any two files they like. What it does is make it easy for an honest photographer to show an honest edit, and most of the suspicion in this argument is aimed at edits nobody has seen.

A B-1 Lancer arriving at RAF Fairford, seen through bushes — Paul Moseley spotted a B-1 Lancer coming into RAF Fairford through the bushes and built the shot around them. This one has an Edit Reveal on Kōlab, so you can see the file he started with.

Keep your originals

This one is worth doing even if you never go near a generative tool. Keep the raw files, back them up somewhere that isn't the same building as the camera, and keep the shots either side of the one you used. A second drive sitting next to the first one on your desk is a backup right up until somebody knocks a cup of tea over both. If a shot is ever questioned, the sequence around it settles things in a minute, whereas an argument in the comments settles nothing and runs for a fortnight.

An F-16C Viper in an aggressor scheme departing in low golden light — An F-16 screaming out of Nellis for the Golden Departures Mission, at 1/800s, f/6.3, ISO 200 and 600mm. Low sun lights the airframe gold against a deep blue sky, and whether the light on the subject fits the sky is the first thing to check if you ever replace one.

The line we'd use

Use normal processing tools on what you captured, without feeling you have to list every one.
If the final shot contains something that wasn't there, say so clearly.
If the rules of the competition, publication or client are stricter, follow those.
Keep the originals.
Show the process when it helps.

None of this is meant to make editing look suspicious. Treating every adjustment like a confession has put plenty of people off editing when they were only ever making a print. The aim is to keep a shot that was edited and an image that was partly generated as two separate things with two different names, so nobody has to guess which one they're looking at. An Edit Reveal on Kōlab works the same way: the starting point sits behind the finished shot, so any comments underneath can be about the decisions rather than the result.