Editing Your Photos: What's Okay, and What Isn't
To Summarize: Your images arrive finished… the final work, not a starting point. Please don't run them through filters, editing apps, FaceTune, or AI. Light cropping to fit a frame or a social format is fine; recomposing the image isn't. And if there's something you'd like changed, just ask me… that's what I’m here for.
Your photos are delivered done. Fully edited, color-corrected, finished. What you receive is the final piece… not a draft to touch up.
That feels obvious when I say it out loud. But phones have made editing so easy — a filter here, a quick FaceTune there — that altering a photo has become a reflex most people don't think twice about. So it's worth saying plainly: a professional image is a finished work, the same as any other.
The part people forget
Nobody would take an illustration they commissioned, repaint part of it in an app, and repost it. It would feel obviously wrong.
Photos get treated differently only because editing them is so accessible now. But it's the same thing. When you change a delivered image — the color, the skin, the crop, the mood — it stops being the work you were given, and stops being the work I made. It goes out into the world as my photography when it isn't anymore.
(This is the same idea behind licensing, actually. When a company licenses a Beatles song for an ad, they can't rewrite it to fit… the work stays intact. Images work the same way. → How licensing works)
What that means, concretely
No filters, FaceTune, or retouching apps on delivered images.
No AI editing - "enhance," generative fill, adding or removing things, style changes.
No recomposing. Small cropping to fit a frame or a social format is completely fine. Cropping that changes the composition - cutting the image down into a different shot - isn't.
"But I want something changed"
No problem! Just let me know.
If a blemish is bugging you, if you wish a stray hair were gone, if you'd like a little softening - that's what retouching is for, and I'd genuinely rather do it right than have it done in an app. Every image already comes fully polished, detailed retouching on your favorites is built into every session, and more is available anytime. The answer to "I wish this were different" is never a phone app. It's ask me.
Why this protects you, too
Here's the honest, practical reason underneath all of it: running a professional image through a phone app almost always makes it worse. Skin goes plastic. The filter fights the color I built for your photos. AI leaves artifacts you won't notice until later - in print, at the worst possible moment.
You paid for images that look a certain way. Keeping them as delivered is how they stay that way… and how it stays a true representation of my work.
The bottom line
Love your photos. Print them, share them, post them, frame them. Just keep them as they are… and if there's ever something you want changed, I'm one message away.