I've been pondering where we should draw the line when manipulating images. Everyone manipulates in some way, but when entering competitions, how much is too much?

A couple of examples here. This location has a car park in the foreground - totally unattractive. I have produced two images which artificially replace that car park with sea. One of them uses entirely my one images, mirroring the castle, using my own sea etc etc. However, 50% of the image is not original although it's all my own work. It's also not all that good when compared to the second image.

The second image uses a "Flaming Pear" plug in, which does a far superior job, but 50% of the image isn't even photographic, and certainly not mine! It's software generated. The question is .... how far can we legitimately go in competitions with images which rely so much on plug-ins and artificially generated imagery. Thoughts anyone?



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