Can you edit these nature images? – Cheap Nature Images

Yes, without restriction, for any use the licence permits. Crop, flip, grade, retouch, composite, cut out, distort beyond recognition.

The two limits

You may not distribute the edited image as an image. Editing, however heavy, does not create a new file you can licence onward.

And you may not edit in a way that misrepresents a real, identifiable place or person. Design use is unrestricted; the line is a factual claim. Replace a sky freely, then do not caption the result as a record of that place on that day.

Foliage

Green occupies a narrow hue band, and a global saturation increase collapses a varied hillside into one flat colour. Adjust luminance and hue separately, and work on targeted ranges rather than the whole image.

Sharpening foliage at full resolution and then downsampling produces crunch on every leaf edge. Sharpen at output size, always.

Water

Long exposures of moving water carry very smooth gradients that band under aggressive compression and posterise under aggressive contrast. Make contrast adjustments gently and check the smoothest area at 100 per cent before exporting.

Sky

The most-edited part of any nature frame and the least forgiving.

Gradients band easily; work in 16-bit if you are making large tonal moves. Selections along a treeline leave a halo that is invisible at fit-to-screen and obvious at full size, so always check the boundary at 100 per cent. And when replacing a sky, match the light direction before you match the colour: a scene lit from the left under a sky lit from the right reads as wrong instantly.

Cut-outs

Fine structures at the edge of a subject are where automatic selection fails. Work at full resolution, refine the edge with a small radius, and check against mid-grey rather than white; fringing invisible on white is obvious on a coloured layout.

Compositing

Buy several frames and build one image if you want to. Match light direction first, colour second, and check the scale of anything recognisable.

Keep the layered file and record the asset ids in it. A composite from four licensed images is four licences, and knowing which four later is worth ten seconds now.

Comp before you buy

Build the layout with the watermarked preview first. Previews are served at seven widths up to the full size of the original, so you can place one at real dimensions and see whether the crop works and whether the colour sits with the rest of the page.

Buy afterwards. The mark exists precisely so this step is free, and at three dollars the only expensive mistake available is buying the wrong image twice.