Telling clients which photos you changed

Checked against CullTone on 18 Oct 2026.

Painting out an exit sign changes a photograph more than any colour grade, because the wall behind the sign was never photographed: something had to invent it. That's the line worth telling a couple about. Where you draw it, and how you say it, matters more than which box in the metadata gets ticked.

Our line: did you invent pixels?

We label a photo when part of the picture was made up rather than captured. That covers removing a person or an object, replacing a sky or a background, and any change made from a written prompt or a Retouch template. It covers CullTone's free Remove tool too: it runs on your Mac and costs nothing, and it still invents what was behind the spot you painted over.

We don't label exposure, white balance, looks, crops, or adjustments painted through a mask. The mask may have found the sky for you, but the change inside it is an ordinary slider you could have moved by hand. Culling doesn't change a single pixel.

Face retouch sits closest to the line. CullTone's face retouch smooths skin and softens blemishes the same way every time and never reshapes a face. We mark those files "retouched" in their keywords rather than calling them AI-edited. Some photographers would label any retouching, and some clients will expect it. We think a label that appears on every portrait stops meaning anything, but it's a fair thing to disagree about, and the keyword leaves the choice with you.

The label, and where it gets lost

The photo industry's field for this is IPTC Digital Source Type, a short fixed list of values describing how an image was made. A straight camera photo is digitalCapture; a real photograph with invented parts mixed in is compositeWithTrainedAlgorithmicMedia, and that's the value CullTone writes on every changed version, along with the keyword "AI-modified" and a short description of the change. The gallery shows the same label on the photo.

Metadata is fragile. Many messaging apps and some social platforms strip it on sharing, so the label can be gone by the time an aunt reposts the picture. CullTone doesn't write C2PA content credentials, the signed record some cameras and platforms now support. What carries the weight is the label in the gallery and what you told the couple.

What to tell the couple

Say it before the wedding, in the contract, in a sentence a couple will actually read. Something like:

"We may remove small distractions, such as an exit sign or a stray guest, from some photos. Those photos are labelled as AI-edited in your gallery and in the files, and we keep an unchanged version of each one, which you can ask for."

Then keep the promise. CullTone keeps every changed photo as a separate version, with your original edit beside it and the RAW untouched, so handing over the unchanged one is a download, not a re-edit.

Ask before anything bigger than a distraction. Swapping a grey sky for a sunset, or removing someone who was there, changes what the photograph says about the day, and some couples won't want it however good it looks. A redo request in the gallery is a tidy way to get that yes in writing.

Cases near the line

Decide these once, not wedding by wedding.

A head swap from your own frames. A face from the next frame of the same group setup is a composite, but every pixel came from your camera. By our line it needs no label. It does change what happened in the instant the shutter fired, so if a client asks whether a group photo was combined, say yes.

Removing a stray guest. One person walking through the back of the ceremony: label it. A whole row of guests removed to tidy the frame: label it, and ask first, because those guests may be in the family's photo for a reason.

Upscaling. Enlarging with invented fine detail adds something the sensor never recorded. CullTone marks upscaled files with an "upscaled" keyword. For a print the size of a wall, tell the couple the file was enlarged; for a gallery image nobody will inspect at 100%, the keyword is enough.

Extending the frame. Painting in more background to fit a crop or a print ratio is invented content at the edges. Label it, even when nobody would ever notice.

The test is the same each time: would the couple feel misled if they found out later? If you hesitate, label it.

The legal part we can't settle for you

Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which applies from 2 August 2026, requires anyone who generates or manipulates an image that amounts to a deep fake to disclose it. A wedding photo with an exit sign removed probably isn't what the law has in mind, and a group photo with an extra person added might be. We're not lawyers, and the rules differ outside the EU. If you work for clients in the EU or publish their photos there, ask someone qualified where your edits fall, and label generously until you know.