How much photo editing is too much for a nature shot? Ansel Adams heavily altered and improved his photos in the darkroom, famously viewing the photographic negative as a musical score and the final darkroom print as the performance. As for me, I have traditionally come down on the side of getting my images 90 percent “there” in my camera and limiting myself to five minutes of digital darkroom correction time in PaintShop Pro.

My next book, “God’s B-Sides: Bible Passages Preachers Pray You’ll Never Read,” will feature roughly 150 humorous/poignant AI images I created with Adobe Firefly. I selected that program because their images are commercially safe and the original artists are paid for their work. The online version of Photoshop came with my Adobe Firefly subscription. At first I ignored it, but after I completed the images I needed for “God’s B-Sides,” Photoshop called out, “Marty, give me a try!”

The online version of Photoshop has an “AI helper” that can fine-tune images with a simple prompt. In experimenting with it, I have found that I still prefer the accuracy of the colors and lighting I get with PaintShop Pro. However, if an image needs a lot of work, sometimes Photoshop can do an amazing job in a short amount of time.

How much is acceptable digital darkroom improvement, and how much is cheating? Since I’m a wildlife photographer, my belief is that adjusting an image to appear how it looked through my camera’s viewfinder is legitimate, while making an image that looks substantially different is “cheating” if I don’t mention it, or “digital art” if I do mention it.

So today’s whale shark photo is “digital art.” Deb and I swam with this and several other whale sharks last year off the coast of New Guinea. The problem was that the water was cloudy. So cloudy, in fact, that we both got “whale shark rides” when we didn’t see the sharks surfacing below us until it was too late to get out of the way!

Underwater photography is difficult enough without having to deal with water conditions that can be cloudy or silty. So I asked photoshop to “make the cloudy water clear,” and this whale shark image is what I got (I also adjusted the colors for accuracy in PaintShop Pro).

I wonder what Ansel Adams would think of AI help in a darkroom. For me, when I apply editing that is this extreme, I will announce, “It really didn’t look this way.”

I have included the original image for comparison.