4 ms·

Yeah, they're fake in the sense that "they're not what came out of the camera", but not in the sense that "this scene never happened".

aaronpk 8y ago
No picture you see is exactly what came out of the camera. As the author points out at the end of the article, if your camera outputs a jpg image, then it's already made its own decisions of how to manipulate the raw data.
- kurtisc 8y ago
  And post-processing for the lens, or to compensate for having twice as many green sensors as red/blue.
craigsmansion 8y ago
I think the discrepancy lies between "this scene never happened" and "this scene was never witnessed by the human eye as such". I think one of the expectations of a photograph can be to be a reproduction of a scene as it was witnessed, not as it happened. That is, as the photographer was shooting the volcano, he never beheld the Milky way and the sea of light from the valleys that way, that only appeared in post-production. I don't necessarily think it's fake to prettify an image [1], but I can imagine why some people would consider it less than real. 1. "Pillars of Creation" looks awe inspiring in spite of: "The blue colors in the image represent oxygen, red is sulfur, and green represents both nitrogen and hydrogen."
- stordoff 8y ago
  I'd split into documentary-reproducing what you could witness and artistic-using photographic techniques to create a pleasing result. It's also not really post-processing - it's a choice you make at capture time. Do I leave the shutter open for (say) 1/30s to document what I'm seeing, or 5s to capture the light trails?
Sharlin 8y ago
You can't even see what comes out of an image sensor. The raw sensor data inevitable requires interpretation to turn it into a human-viewable image, and there exists no single canonical interpretation. That can happen in the camera, or later in a separate software, but there's no way around it.

aaronpk 8y ago

No picture you see is exactly what came out of the camera. As the author points out at the end of the article, if your camera outputs a jpg image, then it's already made its own decisions of how to manipulate the raw data.

kurtisc 8y ago
And post-processing for the lens, or to compensate for having twice as many green sensors as red/blue.

craigsmansion 8y ago

I think the discrepancy lies between "this scene never happened" and "this scene was never witnessed by the human eye as such". I think one of the expectations of a photograph can be to be a reproduction of a scene as it was witnessed, not as it happened. That is, as the photographer was shooting the volcano, he never beheld the Milky way and the sea of light from the valleys that way, that only appeared in post-production. I don't necessarily think it's fake to prettify an image [1], but I can imagine why some people would consider it less than real. 1. "Pillars of Creation" looks awe inspiring in spite of: "The blue colors in the image represent oxygen, red is sulfur, and green represents both nitrogen and hydrogen."

stordoff 8y ago
I'd split into documentary-reproducing what you could witness and artistic-using photographic techniques to create a pleasing result. It's also not really post-processing - it's a choice you make at capture time. Do I leave the shutter open for (say) 1/30s to document what I'm seeing, or 5s to capture the light trails?

Sharlin 8y ago

You can't even see what comes out of an image sensor. The raw sensor data inevitable requires interpretation to turn it into a human-viewable image, and there exists no single canonical interpretation. That can happen in the camera, or later in a separate software, but there's no way around it.