Categories: Uncategorized

Faking Images vs. Taking Them: Post-processing Tradeoffs

Someone asked me on Facebook recently when I mentioned some adjustments on an image, “I thought you said you made no edits?”
Fair question!
My bio on Facebook states no AI (images) and no Photoshop (faked stuff: substituting skies, faking reflections, adding objects, etc). I am allowed very few letters to convey that, so a request for clarification is perfectly reasonable.

Often the image recorded on the sensor to be slightly bright or dark, or it may lack the contrast we perceived at the time, so small adjustments are necessary. So my goal in my bio is to convey that my intention is to produce a realistic rendering of what we saw/experienced, using reasonable photographic techniques. I see some workshop leaders advertising workshops based on clearly completely faked compositions such as a Milky Way arch where it can never appear, the moon placed where it did not appear or at a faked scale, reflections clearly faked instead of photographed, and so on. Photographers and do what they want to produce their results, but I feel that it would be unethical to lure in workshop clients with images that I can’t lead them to, that they can’t simply capture on their own cameras using fairly standard photography techniques. So I place that limitation on myself not to judge others, but to assure potential clients I might guide that the spots and moments I show are real.

To produce an image that is “real” to the way we experience a scene, it’s important to understand and to freely acknowledge that our eyes “see”, and our brains perceive what we see, very differently than a digital sensor captures a scene. When you look at a dark area, you pupils open up. When you look at a bright area, your pupils close down. Almost never would your eyes look at a scene and record the same “exposure” everywhere. So I absolutely use Adobe Lightroom to correct such issues. Unlike Photoshop which was used to create things (it was designed for graphic artists), Lightroom is designed for photographers and enables the same sorts of traditional adjustments that photographers made in darkrooms for 100+ years before digital photography came around.

To get specific regarding the image above, when we see a reflection, to our brains it seems to be roughly the same intensity as looking directly at the object. When you look at a digital photo, you can see that the reflection is “too dark” compared to what you saw and remember. To correct this in-camera as you capture an image, a 2-stop graduated neutral density filter is usually the right amount to knock down the non-reflected part, to make the direct view match the reflection (as we see it). Each stop is 2X or 1/2 the light of adjacent stops, so a reflection being 2 stops darker means that a reflection has only 25% of the light of the direct view of the same object, and the direct view of the object is 4X brighter. And we’d never perceive that onsite. So we’re faced with either leaving the digital uimage with unrealistic details intact, or correcting them, if not completely, at least to make them less distracting.

Mobile phones used to show the direct image that the sensor captured. And those results were generally terrible, looking very unrealistic. Over time vendors like Apple started to offer more internal processing, letting you choose a result produced via High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques, and those were often better. Their internal image processing has gotten so good that they now take away the choice, they just produce a heavily processed image, and it generally looks pretty realistic. In other words, it just looks “good enough” and pretty realistic, and it became irrelevant to inform people what they were doing behind the scenes.

High end digital cameras simply still provide the raw results from the sensor, and leave the corrections to be the responsibility of the photographer. In this image I tried brightening up the the reflection a bit to make its darkness less unrealistic (to our brains), and for some reason the brightening of the reflected rainbow seemed too much, the reflected granite too little. So if I ever want to print this, I’ll want to reduce potential distractions like that, where areas aren’t quite right, either to the way reflections work, or to our perception of them. My goal if to make the result look less wrong, compared to the physics (in this case how reflections work) and to our perception. Small brightness and darkness adjustments known as “dodging and burning” have existed a film darkrooms for a century, and aren’t controversial in any way.

I hope that you don’t mind that I’m trying to reduce the issues with digital photography, and make the results “less fake”, since sensors are inherently stupid and the default process of producing an unadjusted camera image completely mismatches the way that our own vision and perception works.

While it’s convenient to produce an image “straight out of camera” when the digital process accidentally aligns well enough with what we see, people who adopt that as a goal are limiting themselves unnecessarily, perhaps based on a limited knowledge of physics (such as reflections) and of human vision and perception. As I’ve explained, a little understanding goes a long way toward removing misguided goals and personal barriers.

There’s an interesting case that test how far the correction process “should” go. When you’re out in nature a lot, you sometimes encounter light and color that is literally unbelievable. It exceeds anything you could have possibly expected or anticipated. It exceeds what you’ve experienced in that spot or in similar events. The range of light and color triggers what can best be described as awe. People who chase total solar eclipses for example are often trying to repeat the experience of awe, at seeing the sun’s shimmering corona. A digital sensor cannot capture the full range of light that can occur in a natural scene, and the result will also be unable to produce the range of light (especially in a print, since you can’t reproduce the full light of the sun). So the photographer has a difficult task on how to best capture the original event, and they also have the additional challenge of not “dumbing down” the result too much to appease potential skeptics.

When we’re leading workshops and insanely dramatic conditions unfold before our eyes, I make a point of pointing out “No one is going to believe this” (it’s literally unbelievable to us in that moment). After letting that sink in for a while, I follow up with “And if everyone does believe what you’re showing them, you’ve dumbed down the result”. In other words, when faced with the nearly impossible task of replicating the full intensity of many dramatic moments in nature, it’s to be expected if people are skeptical of what you’re showing them. It’s sad that people don’t get out more to experience more moments like those, but the harsh reality is that if you don’t get at least one comment of “AI” or “fake” or “over-processed” from the rendering of those moments, the image may need a little more brightness or contrast. To be clear, I’m not advocating that photographers seek comments of “fake”, I’m setting a marker in their memory of just how amazing the monet is, and I’m giving them permission to not have to please every armchair quarterback, every keyboard jockey on the Internet. I’m trying to free them up to produce the best possible representation that they can convey.

My own work has the same deficiencies. I don’t always have the time, skills, or the tools to adequately reproduce what I experienced on the first pass or two, so I have to give myself permission to produce what I can at the time, and go back to rework the image later to get it closer to what it should be to better represent the experience. Film photographers such as Ansel Adams often did this, and some classic film images are scanned and reworked in digital tools (some of Galen Rowell’s work for example). I feel like to reproduce some of these moments I’d need a super bright display that approximates the brightness of the sun as needed, and I’d have to display the result in a similarly bright way. None of that is coming to the 8-bit JPEG files we share on the Internet and whatever displays people have, so most of the time we’ll just have to do the best we can with the limitations of what we’re working with.

Knowing a little bit of physics helps us understand why we’re seeing what we do in our results, and we discuss this with our clients so they can decide whether they want to convey what the camera captured, or what they saw and perceived when the image was recorded. Because those options are not the same.

Jeff Sullivan

Jeff Sullivan leads landscape photography workshops in national parks and public lands throughout California and the American West.

Next Should I Use a Light Pollution Filter For Night Photography? »

Previous « Blogging in the Age of AI

View Comments

Eric Jaeger says:

July 30, 2026 at 10:43 pm

Good article, Jeff. Galen Rowell wrote a lot about the differences between human vision and photographic results. You're both trying to reproduce an image which reflects the scene as you saw it, and he used the same ethical restraints you do. Bravo.