"Do photo contests typically allow entrants to heavily edit photos?" This is going to depend on the genre of the contest, but for most contest types outside of

"Do photo contests typically allow entrants to heavily edit photos?" This is going to depend on the genre of the contest, but for most contest types outside of the journalistic realm editing style will very much be a part of the process. You will typically submit the final print and no one will know what the original picture was. There are some contests out there with some pretty outrageous editing though!