Competitions are judged and scored by three judges selected by the Judge Selector (an S4C position). Judges are selected from either S4C member clubs or from outside the S4C family. However, two or all of the judges may not be members of the same S4C member club. Furthermore, none of the judges in the last month of the Competition Year (April) may be active participants in club or S4C competitions.

With ‘onsite’ competitions, a scoring machine is used to ensure that the scoring is ‘blind’, that is, each judge is unaware of any other judge’s decision before making his/her own decision. Each judge gives each image a score of 5 to 9 (DQed images are given a score of 3, but this may depend on the scoring system used). All Skill Levels are judged together, but the judges are not aware of the Entrant’s Skill Level for any given image. With competitions judged remotely over the Internet, each judge is automatically unaware of another judge’s scores.

Thus each image may receive a score as high as 27. Images rarely score below 18 unless DQed.

A judge will recuse herself or himself if there is a clear conflict of interest. Thus a judge will recuse if the image under consideration is her or his own image or that of a close relative or partner. In the event a judge recuses, the image will receive the average of the other two judges’ scores, rounded up.

Regardless of the recusal rule, judges may not enter makeups into any competition they are judging. For digital competitions, they can use makeups to compensate for any ‘deficiency’ in the total number of images entered across the year.