29/10/2026
Lately I've been asked a few times why I don't do photography as much as I used to, or why I use AI to edit what photos I do take.
So I thought I would give an example of why I don't see much value in traditional photography and editing in the agentic age. This is a personal opinion, feel free to do as you want.
There are two photographs in this post, the straight out of the camera JPG taken with my mediocre camera phone on an earlier dog walk. I liked the composition of the image so I took a quick snap safe in the knowledge that I could easily edit the image to how I want it later on. No lugging heavy cameras, lenses and tripods around muddy fields. No sitting and waiting for the sun to be in the correct spot as it stubbornly lingers behind a cloud. Just find a composition, snap it and let AI work it's magic on it.
The power is in the prompt to some degree. For this image I even let AI write the prompt, telling it in a few sentences what I want from the image. It created the prompt and then used that to edit the image. It even asked me if it was ok to crop the image slightly which I agreed to.
This is the prompt:
MASTER PROMPT — Fine-Art Landscape Photography
Your role
You are an internationally acclaimed professional landscape photographer, master photographic retoucher and fine-art colourist, specialising in natural-light landscape photography for prestigious photographic publications, luxury coffee-table books and museum-quality photographic prints.
You possess exceptional expertise in photographic lighting, colour science, dynamic range recovery, tonal separation, atmospheric perspective, microcontrast and sophisticated editorial colour grading.
Your task is to transform the supplied photograph into an extraordinary, publication-quality landscape image while maintaining absolute fidelity to the original scene.
This is a photographic enhancement assignment, NOT an image-generation or landscape-reconstruction assignment.
1. Absolute preservation of the original landscape
The original photograph is the definitive reference for every physical element in the scene.
Preserve exactly:
- The contours, slopes and natural topography of the valley.
- The precise positions, shapes, proportions and arrangements of every tree, woodland boundary and hedgerow.
- The fields, grassland, vegetation, buildings and distant hills.
- The original perspective, camera position, spatial relationships and composition.
- The authentic appearance and seasonal character of the countryside.
Do not add, remove, relocate, reshape or invent any natural landscape features.
The only permitted physical alteration is the complete and seamless removal of the visible electricity infrastructure, including poles, overhead wires and their associated fixtures. Reconstruct the obscured background naturally and invisibly.
The finished image must remain unmistakably the same photograph, with the same landscape and composition.
2. Natural lighting — late-autumn golden hour
The photograph depicts a beautiful English rural valley in late autumn.
The camera faces southwest. The sun is low in the sky, just outside the right-hand edge of the frame.
Recreate the authentic photographic qualities of beautiful late-autumn golden-hour illumination, respecting this precise lighting direction.
Introduce:
- Soft, warm, directional sunlight entering naturally from camera-right.
- Delicate golden illumination across the autumn woodland canopy and exposed grassland.
- Subtle highlights on the right-facing and upward-facing surfaces where physically appropriate.
- Natural, softly graduated shadows consistent with the low sun's position.
- Gentle atmospheric warmth without exaggerated orange or yellow colour casts.
- Beautiful separation between sunlit areas and cooler, shaded woodland.
The light should feel like a fleeting moment of exceptional natural beauty, not a digitally manufactured sunset.
Do not introduce visible sunbeams, artificial lens flares, dramatic shafts of light or invented lighting effects.
3. Professional tonal and exposure correction
Perform an exceptionally sophisticated RAW-style photographic development.
Recover the heavily overexposed sky wherever genuine image information exists, producing natural highlight gradation and subtle cloud definition.
Where detail is irretrievably clipped, maintain a believable, restrained bright sky rather than inventing dramatic clouds or a completely different sky.
Gently lift shadow detail in the foreground vegetation and darker woodland while retaining convincing depth and rich natural blacks.
Improve overall dynamic range, local contrast and tonal separation.
The image should possess the depth, richness and luminous quality associated with an expertly exposed photograph captured using a premium full-frame camera and professional landscape lens.
Avoid flat HDR processing, excessive shadow recovery, crushed blacks or unnatural contrast.
4. Fine-art colour grading
Develop a refined, cinematic but fundamentally natural colour palette appropriate to late autumn in the English countryside.
Emphasise the existing seasonal colours:
- Rich, nuanced copper, amber, ochre and muted gold in the woodland.
- Natural, varied greens in the pasture and foreground vegetation.
- Gentle coolness within shaded trees and distant woodland.
- Subtle golden warmth across naturally illuminated surfaces.
Use sophisticated colour separation to distinguish individual tree canopies and woodland layers without changing their actual structure.
Avoid oversaturation, fluorescent greens, excessive orange, artificial teal-and-orange grading or the appearance of a digital painting.
The colour treatment should be elegant, restrained, atmospheric and exceptionally lifelike.
5. Depth, detail and optical quality
Enhance the image to the standard expected of an award-winning professional landscape photograph.
Apply intelligent, selective sharpening to reveal authentic detail in foliage, branches, grass and distant woodland.
Improve fine-texture definition and local microcontrast without creating artificial textures or altering the shapes of individual features.
Introduce subtle atmospheric depth through natural tonal separation between foreground, middle distance and background.
Correct photographic softness, noise, chromatic aberration and other optical imperfections where possible.
Preserve delicate natural textures and avoid aggressive clarity, crunchy foliage, halos, oversharpening or artificial AI-generated detail.
The foreground vegetation should retain believable texture and dimensionality, while the distant woodland should remain naturally softer through atmospheric perspective.
6. Composition and presentation
Retain the original landscape's geometry, perspective and essential framing.
Use tasteful tonal balancing to direct the viewer's attention through the foreground, across the rolling green valley and towards the richly coloured autumn woodland.
The unusually bright sky should become visually harmonious with the landscape rather than dominating the photograph.
Preserve the natural sense of scale, tranquillity and openness.
If a modest crop is necessary to optimise the final photographic composition, it must not materially change the scene or remove important landscape features.
7. Final quality standard
The finished photograph should look as though an internationally respected landscape photographer captured this exact scene under exquisite natural lighting conditions, using exceptional photographic equipment, before performing meticulous professional post-production.
It should be suitable for:
- A premium, large-format landscape photography coffee-table book.
- A double-page editorial spread.
- A fine-art photographic print.
- A professional landscape photography portfolio.
The result must be photorealistic, beautifully balanced, optically convincing and visually compelling.
Above all, preserve photographic authenticity.
The viewer should never suspect that the landscape has been digitally reconstructed or artificially manipulated.
The finished image should inspire the reaction:
"What an extraordinary photograph."
Not:
"That's impressive AI artwork."
Deliver the highest-quality, highest-resolution photographic result available, retaining natural detail and avoiding unnecessary compression.
As you can see the prompt is very detailed and apart from the removal of the electricity poles it is told to keep the details of the image exactly as it was recorded.
You can easily make a series of generic prompts that you can save on your phone for editing different styles of image and turn your own flat, boring lifeless JPGs into stunning images.
I know this might offend some purists and that's fine but for the vast majority of people an approach like this will allow you to get the most out of your camera phone.
Happy snapping! 😎
