Even old school chemical films were the same thing, just different domain.

There is no such thing as “unprocessed” data, at least that we can perceive.

kdazzle 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly - film photographers heavily process(ed) their images from the film processing through to the print. Ansel Adams wrote a few books on the topic and they’re great reads.

And different films and photo papers can have totally different looks, defined by the chemistry of the manufacturer and however _they_ want things to look.

▲

acomjean 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Excepting slide photos. No real adjustment once taken (a more difficult medium than negative film which you can adjust a little when printing)

You’re right about Ansel Adams. He “dodged and burned” extensively (lightened and darkened areas when printing.) Photoshop kept the dodge and burn names on some tools for a while.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IoCtni-WWVs

When we printed for our college paper we had a dial that could adjust the printed contrast a bit of our black and white “multigrade” paper (it added red light). People would mess with the processing to get different results too (cold/ sepia toned). It was hard to get exactly what you wanted and I kind of see why digital took over.

	▲	macintux 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I found one way to "adjust" slide photos: I accidentally processed a (color) roll of mine using C-41. The result was surprisingly not terrible.

▲

NordSteve 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A school photography company I worked for used a custom Kodak stock. They were unsatisfied with how Kodak's standard portrait film handled darker skin tones.

They were super careful to maintain the look across the transition from film to digital capture. Families display multiple years of school photos next to each other and they wanted a consistent look.

▲

adrian_b 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

True, but there may be different intentions behind the processing.

Sometimes the processing has only the goal to compensate the defects of the image sensor and of the optical elements, in order to obtain the most accurate information about the light originally coming from the scene.

Other times the goal of the processing is just to obtain an image that appears best to the photographer, for some reason.

For casual photographers, the latter goal is typical, but in scientific or technical applications the former goal is frequently encountered.

Ideally, a "raw" image format is one where the differences between it and the original image are well characterized and there are no additional unknown image changes done for an "artistic" effect, in order to allow further processing when having either one of the previously enumerated goals.