Regardless of whether you call yourself a photographer or not, I am sure you have come across the age old question:
Did you edit this photo?
Now there are different ways to interpret this question. If I were to not take offense from the question, I’d assume it meant to be a compliment, asserting the end result is pretty regardless of whether it is far twisted and manipulated from reality, the actual scene. It could mean the person who asked is trying to critique your photograph or your skills to record imagery out of the camera in contrast or comparison to manipulations in post, or could mean the person is simply trying to understand how far from reality the end result is - assuming reality being what you got straight out of the camera.
If you are not shooting RAW, the image you are getting out of the camera is most likely a JPEG file. This is already “manipulated” by the camera. If you are shooting RAW then it is up to the photographer to export the image into a format such as JPEG that is shareable. This means whether you like it or not, the photograph is “manipulated” in one way or another therefore, the question we came across earlier in this post is vague. Educated, alternative questions could be:
Did you edit this photo or let the camera do it?
How different was the actual scene compared to this photo?
The photographs that come out of my camera are primarily RAW files, i.e. I try to capture as much data as I can while shooting, then manipulate in post processing to produce images that are visually pleasing to me. RAW images do not look anywhere close to how the real scene looked at the time of shooting and therefore, my primary goal is to “fix” attributes such as white balance, brightness and color in post to get the end result as close as possible. But this does not mean it has to be always realistic.
Now that we have established the purpose and importance of recognizing post processing in photography, let me introduce you to my basic workflow: I use Photoshop mainly for three things: perspective correction, color grading and (most important of all) selective editing. Sometimes the perspective corrected version does not look as appealing as the straight-out-of-camera original with rectilinear distortion (therefore I abandoned this edit), this actually means I am going to preserve the “distorted” original for this particular photograph, not attempt to make it look like how the eyes perceived…
Reality is merely another version created by the human brain