I was quite snobby before, like, ‘I only shoot film,’” confesses Phil Knott. But the cheeky Brit, who got his start by leaving the slow academia of college for the real-life experience of a studio assistant, is becoming synonymous with avant-garde digital manipulation on both sides of the Atlantic. “I prefer digital now. I like post-work, but it’s all very rough. It’s not like slick Photoshop; it’s more like New York: painted graffiti with layers piled upon layers.”

Before going digital, Knott would have to make multiple shoots, with numerous trips to the printer to create backgrounds and overlays. “Back in the day, it was done by going through books and photocopying the shit out of these things at Kinko’s, and that would take two days out of your time,” he says. “Now you go and do your bits on digital camera, come back, and you just drop them in your own computer. It’s a lot easier.”

It only sounds like the visual equivalent of Auto-Tune. In Knott’s hands, a post-shoot tool suite is used to enhance, not cover up. “Everything must be good enough to stand alone before you start messing around with it or else it’s kind of lame,” he says. His raw images remain stark, riveting compositions, bleeding with a full spectrum of richness and a matrix of color. From there, he may use lighting techniques and filters to build up or downplay contrast. Or he may spend days (and “a lot of late nights”) pulling elements from his library of photos, adding and subtracting until an image makes itself clear—all to come up with that one representation that melds his comic book influences, his posterlike tendencies and his quest to “make the picture what it sounds like.” Along the way, he saves different iterations of his work, usually about 50 ideas per final shot. “Even if you don’t use it as something, it’s always good notes for something else,” he says. “The end of one thing is mostly the starting point for the next thing you’re doing.”

All of this encroaches on territory traditionally under the auspices of art directors and graphic designers, but for Knott the extension is natural. “When I’m doing post stuff, it’s like, ‘Let me entertain you,’” he says. “It’s just an experimentation with things. Maybe it’s kind of silly, but I find it really boring if you don’t wanna keep pushing and pushing and learning something new.”