Photography is also an art. When painters jack up saturations in their choices of paint colors people don't bat an eyelid. There's no good reason photographers cannot take that liberty as well, and tone mapping choices is in fact a big part of photographers' expressive medium.

If you want reality, go there in person and stop looking at photos. Viewing imagery is a fundamentally different type of experience.

▲

zmgsabst a day ago | parent [-]

Sure — but people reasonably distinguish between photos and digital art, with “photo” used to denote the intent to accurately convey rather than artistic expression.

We’ve had similar debates about art using miniatures and lens distortions versus photos since photography was invented — and digital editing fell on the lens trick and miniature side of the issue.

▲

dheera a day ago | parent [-]

Journalistic/event photography is about accuracy to reality, almost all other types of photography are not.

Portrait photography -- no, people don't look like that in real life with skin flaws edited out

Landscape photography -- no, the landscapes don't look like that 99% of the time, the photographer picks the 1% of the time when it looks surreal

Staged photography -- no, it didn't really happen

Street photography -- a lot of it is staged spontaneously

Product photography -- no, they don't look like that in normal lighting

▲

switchbak 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a longstanding debate in landscape photography communities - virtually everyone edits, but there’s real debate as to what the line is and what is too much. There does seem to be an idea of being faithful to the original experience, which I subscribe to, but that’s certainly not universal.

▲

NetMageSCW 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nothing can be staged spontaneously.

▲

BenjiWiebe 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Re landscape photography: If it actually looked like that in person 1 percent of the time, I'd argue it's still accurate to reality.

	▲	dheera 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are a whole lot of landscape photographs out there I can vouch for their realism 1% of the time because I do a lot of landscape photography myself and tend to get out at dawn and dusk a lot. There are lots of shots I got where the sky looked a certain way for a grand total of 2 minutes before sunrise, and I can see similar lighting in other peoples' shots as real. A lot of armchair critics on the internet who only go out to their local park at high noon will say they look fake but they're not. There are other elements I can spot realism where the armchair critic will call it a "bad photoshop". For example, a moon close to the horizon usually looks jagged and squashed due to atmospheric effects. That's the sign of a real moon. If it looks perfectly round and white at the horizon, I would call it a fake.