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In a competition like WPY, the rules are pretty well detailed and give a good framework as to what is permissible, but then each juror bring their own personal taste and views. Other contests are more vague with statements like “the photograph must be true to nature…”
My answers to your 3 questions (I’ve added numbers for convenience):
- If the photo is 90% there out of camera – doesn’t take more edits than general WB / contrast, tad of saturation and modest cropping, that’s where I’d save it for the likes of WPY, which also means no backscatter removal, not a speck. If a photo has a really good competition potential, but needs to be ‘massaged’ further to get there, then it’s out of consideration for WPY-likes contest, but it can have plenty of other uses.
- Not to my knowledge, one-to-one sessions with people who won/judge these contest is one way to get help. I am also happy to look at examples during a TUC coffee chat (these aren’t recorded).
- Again not to my knowledge, but I’d be surprised if any big dog winner went on and volunteered public information of how much they’ve edited their images and yet made it. I mean, WPY is known to have gone back and striped previous winners of their award after a breach of the rules came to the organisers’ attention.
Adequate post-processing is a key ingredient of contest-winning shots, and we hear a lot about images discarded because the author has gone too far. As a judge, I’ve also seen lots of great images that could have done way better with more touch-up. These are discarded before the final RAW check.
Besides – and I’m referring to DPG Masters here – when a photo got as far as the final RAW check, it had grown to be a favourite amongst the judges (roughly 10 images per category), and it was heart breaking to see some of these images excluded from our final deliberation, because editing rules were breached. These final stages are about picking the strongest images, not looking for excuses to discard a photo (that is more the early judging stages).