We live in an age of photography that allows us to completely alter the looks of our images. We can do as little as correct a color, and as much as convert the style of the image, into something like a drawing or an oil painting. Technology has also allowed us to create entirely new images from simple prompts through the use of AI. Photo editing is truly incredible for photographers everywhere, and it is very useful.

In the thumbnail for this blog post, you can see a sliced image of a peacock. The colors seen in the right image are the result of photo editing. While using my 135mm soft focus lens, I managed to capture a bit of the fence of the aviary in the picture. I was able to fix it by changing the contrast, lightness, and saturation of the image just a little bit. The result is pretty impressive. If we were still using film as our primary way of capturing images, this would have been darn near impossible.

Although photo editing is a great way to salvage images and spruce up the lighting, these tools can also be used to completely alter the look of images, for both good and bad. For instance, the magic eraser tool, created by Google, has the ability to remove parts of an image and use AI to fill it in, as if it wasn't even there. 

While this tool can be pretty useful for some situations, I feel that it removes the authenticity of the image. People in the background of a photo can situate the subject in the location. Removing any and every person in the background of an image makes it look like your the last person on Earth.

A similar tool is Adobe Photoshop's generative fill tool. This tool uses a prompt to tell an AI what to generate in a selected portion of a picture. This is even worse than the magic eraser, because it ruins the creativity needed to take a good picture. Some might argue that it helps express the creativity of the person editing the image, and that is just completely incorrect. The editor is just telling a robot what to do, and the AI is scraping from millions of pictures and spitting out a mush of an image for you. 

In conclusion, photo editing is a great and versatile tool, but definitely should be used very sparingly, only really for minor changes or color corrections. I won't tell you what to do, but I believe that AI is just too far for photography edits.