This is also why I absolute hate, hate, hate it when people ask me whether I "edited" a photo or whether a photo is "original", as if trying to explain away nice-looking images as if they are fake.

The JPEGs cameras produce are heavily processed, and they are emphatically NOT "original". Taking manual control of that process to produce an alternative JPEG with different curves, mappings, calibrations, is not a crime.

As a mostly amateur photographer, it doesn't bother me if people ask that question. While I understand the point that the camera itself may be making some 'editing' type decision on the data first, a) in theory each camera maker has attempted to calibrate the output to some standard, b) public would expect two photos taken at same time with same model camera should look identical. That differs greatly from what often can happen in "post production" editing - you'll never find two that are identical.

I noticed this a lot when taking pictures in the mountains.

I used to have a high resolution phone camera from a cheaper phone and then later switched to an iPhone. The latter produced much nicer pictures, my old phone just produces very flat-looking pictures.

People say that the iPhone camera automatically edits the images to look better. And in a way I notice that too. But that’s the wrong way of looking at it; the more-edited picture from the iPhone actually corrresponds more to my perception when I’m actually looking at the scene. The white of the snow and glaciers and the deep blue sky really does look amazing in real life, and when my old phone captured it into a flat and disappointing looking photo with less postprocessing than an iPhone, it genuinely failed to capture what I can see with my eyes. And the more vibrant post processed colours of an iPhone really do look more like what I think I’m looking at.

I don't think it's the same, for me personally I don't like heavily processed images. But not in the sense that they need processing to look decent or to convey the perception of what it was like in real life, more in the sense that the edits change the reality in a significant way so it affects the mood and the experience. For example, you take a photo on a drab cloudy day, but then edit the white balance to make it seem like golden hour, or brighten a part to make it seems like a ray of light was hitting that spot. Adjusting the exposure, touching up slightly, that's all fine, depending on what you are trying to achieve of course. But what I see on instagram or shorts these days is people comparing their raws and edited photos, and without the edits the composition and subject would be just mediocre and uninteresting.

JPEG with OOC processing is different from JPEG OOPC (out-of-phone-camera) processing. Thank Samsung for forcing the need to differentiate.

There's a difference between an unbiased (roughly speaking) pipeline and what (for example) JBIG2 did. The latter counts as "editing" and "fake" as far as I'm concerned. It may not be a crime but at least personally I think it's inherently dishonest to attempt to play such things off as "original".

And then there's all the nonsense BigTech enables out of the box today with automated AI touch ups. That definitely qualifies as fakery although the end result may be visually pleasing and some people might find it desirable.

it's not a crime but applying post processing in an overly generous way that goes a lot further than replicating what a human sees does take away from what makes pictures interesting imho vs other mediums, that it's a genuine representation of something that actually happened.

if you take that away, a picture is not very interesting, it's hyperrealistic so not super creative a lot of the time (compared to eg paintings), & it doesn't even require the mastery of other mediums to get hyperrealistism