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This is a quote from a fine art newsletter. The article was written by Vianno Szabo. Her article covers the use of painters using photographs 

and how photos differ from life and how the artist can compensate for it.  The writer states

"Color in photographs will differ from real life depending on a number of factors.  Color in a photograph is affected by what type of camera you use, the lens, the monitor, the printer, the ink, the levels of ink, and the quality of paper.  Each of these act as a filter and each filter steps you away from a true representation of color.  If you try to match your colors to the photograph, you are copying a false representation of life."

She goes on to state, "Understand that I am not talking about professional photographers who know how to adjust settings and create beautiful images that are art in themselves.  I am talking about photos that most people take, myself included, using a point and shoot technique."

The question comes up in the gallery from time to time. Does he photoshop? I have to confess that it bothers me. My answer always is, I do not even own that program. Not because it’s prying into my photographic process, or because it’s a technical remark rather than a response to the actual image, but because it reveals how little the viewer understands about the medium of photography.

In that question, what is “Photoshop”  being used to mean? Are they asking if it has been “edited”, “manipulated” or “altered” . The implication is, “Has this image been edited or manipulated? I need to know because I want to know if the image is true.”

All photos are edited and they always have been. Even photos that are very realistic are no more an objective, “real” representation of reality than is a watercolor painting. Photography is an abstract medium, and the more you understand that, the better your shooting will be.

The modern digital camera is a technological achievement capable of capturing amazing imagery. However, it still pales in comparison to the imaging power of the human eye. Your eyes can adapt to the color of any light. Cameras can’t do this automatically, which is why you your camera has white balance, adjustment, exposure and focus adjustments. The human eye also has a much greater dynamic range than a camera. Dynamic range is a measure of how big a range from dark to light you can perceive. Photographers measure light in terms of stops, with each stop being either a doubling or halving of light. By this measure, a typical digital camera can capture about 10 to 12, maybe up to 14, stops. The human eye can perceive around 18 to 20 stops worth of light.

The practical upshot of this is that when you enter a situation with a wide range of brightness–bright shadows in a sky, for example, along with dark shadowy details in a foreground, or even just a person standing in front of a bright window–you have to choose whether you want to capture details in the bright sky, or details in the dark foreground. Because of your camera’s limited dynamic range, you can’t have both, even though your eye can see details in both places.

This usually means that you need to tweak an image so that its tones resemble what your eyes saw in the original scene. 

As you read this text, without moving your eyes from this sentence, notice just how wide your field of view is. How much you can see in your peripheral vision. How wide does your peripheral vision go. Can you see details throughout the room. While your attention may be focused on these words, your eyes are capable of a tremendous field of view. Yet that doesn’t mean your brain is processing every detail your eyes are gathering.

There are many things that cause you to pay attention to some visual details while ignoring others. In reality, the camera captures whatever field of view your lens dictates, so the image often contains a lot of extra, useless information. 

This bull elk is about 3o yards from me when I took the picture. Both pictures are the same picture with the one on the left cropped from the other picture. Do you see a cool picture of a bull elk bugling? Do you see that the second point on the left beam grew back wards and along the main beam? Is the first picture photoshoped because it was edited from a digital negative? Was the second picture photoshopped because it was cropped from the first? Did you notice that the green foliage behind the bull was darkened? The green foliage was darkened to keep focus on the elk and to not distract the eye.

Again, is this a perfect simulacrum of the visual information that my eyes gathered at the scene? No, but the edits give the elk a prominence that’s much closer to what I experienced when I was taking the picture. There’s one other thing to consider: The edited photo is more appealing to look at than the unedited one. We don’t take images simply to convey some idea of “truth”. We often take images to create a pretty picture, and a flat, low-contrast image simply isn’t very attractive.

All images are Photoshopped. Or Lightroomed, or iPhoto’d, or dodged, burned, re-touched, cross-processed, developed with more or less agitation in the tank, at warmer or cooler temperatures, and so on and so forth. This has been true since the beginning of photography.

Understanding the representational nature of photography will help you take better pictures because you’ll better understand how to exploit the strengths and weaknesses of the medium.

But perhaps more importantly, it’s important to understand that all images are manipulated. Still photos are the dominant communication medium used for everything from entertainment to artistic expression, journalism to sales. Becoming a more informed, understanding viewer will make it easier to understand when and whether there’s any “truth” in the images put before you.

In many ways, shooting your photos as JPEGs is like sending a roll of film off to a photo lab to develop your images for you, and what you end up with is, whatever you end up with. When shooting JPEGs, your camera becomes the photo lab, processing the image in a series of steps that include setting the white balance, adjusting the contrast and color saturation, applying sharpening, and then compressing the image to reduce its file size.This results in a loss of image quality. You can edit and retouch the photo yourself afterwards in Photoshop, but you're starting with an image that's already been processed. The image has permanent changes already made to its pixels. A lot of the original image information already discarded when it was processed inside the camera. Wouldn't it be better if you could somehow grab the image information straight from the camera's sensor before your camera's little internal photo lab gets its high tech hands on it and makes decisions on what it thinks your photo should look like?

That's where raw comes in. A raw file is like taking the original film negative into the dark room and developing the photo yourself, with complete control and creative freedom over the final result. In fact, raw files are often referred to as digital negatives, and we use a program like Adobe's Camera Raw as a digital darkroom to process the raw filesEvery bit of image information captured by your camera's sensor is saved and stored in the raw file, with no processing of any kind. The files are so "raw" that we can't even open them normally on a computer like we can with JPEGs and other file types. They can only be opened in a program like Camera Raw where we can then process the photos in any way we choose before opening them in a photo editing program for further refinement or saving them out as a JPEGs or some other traditional file type.

Photo manipulation involves transforming or altering a photograph using various methods and techniques to achieve desired results. Some photo manipulations are considered skillful artwork while others are frowned upon as unethical practices, especially when used to deceive the public, such as that used for political propaganda, or to make a product or person look better.Depending on the application and intent, some photo manipulations are considered an art form because it involves the creation of unique images and in some instances, signature expressions of art by photographic artists. For example, Ansel Adams employed some of the more common manipulations using darkroom exposure techniques, such as burning (darkening) and dodging (lightening) a photograph. Other examples of photo manipulation include retouching photographs using ink or paint, airbrushing, double exposure, piecing photos or negatives together in the darkroom, scratching instant films, or through the use of software-based manipulation tools applied to digital images. 

 Where do we draw the line between a processed (JPEG) photo, A digitally developed photo, and a digitally altered photo?