Alain Briot wrote:
>> What I came to understand is this: many people believe that, by the time the shutter is triggered, the appearance of a photograph is sealed. In other words, the prints that they see framed at my shows, prints which are the result of days and days of work adjusting contrast, color saturation and countless other details, are believed to be the direct reproduction of the negative or transparency I exposed in my camera, or of the raw file created by the camera’s digital sensor.
... the fact that a raw file has a very low saturation and contrast level when in its original state, and that virtually no raw files are printed without some amount of saturation and contrast adjustments, is equally of no concern to the audience.<<
Probably not so many people read the publications of the ICC color.org:
http://www.color.org/ICC_white_paper_20_Di...ment_basics.pdfTo compensate for dynamic range compression
and to work from native Raw to a pleasing /preferred rendition
is a rich chapter for Art as well as for Science.
Neither camera manufacturers nor supplier of Raw conversion software really like to talk about this subject. Either for IP reasons, or because their algorithms are of limited general applicability and require intervention by the user (often sold as the freedom to adjust everything depending on taste).
So in this sense we are 'manipulating’ because we have to...
(at least by 2006)
--