You can turn it all off in settings, if you’d like. You can also flip a switch and get RAWs.

The point is that people already accept unlifelike photos.

Of course they do. Why would they want lifelike photos? To remind them of how utterly crap things actually are? No, people want to have that idea of what life was like. Sharing a lifelike image on socials would get laughed off the platform. enhance, Enhanced, ENHANCE get all the likes

Are you British? It doesn't look dreary and depressing everywhere in the world. Silicon Valley is pretty famously nice out most days.

doesn't require one to be British to be thoroughly unimpressed with a photo and want to enhance to improve on the situation to be more in agreement with one's imagination.

You've been able to make "unlifelike" photos ever since you could adjust the aperture, white balance, focal length, and choose the framing. How many times have you seen the Pyramids at Giza in pictures and films? How many of those times were framed to include the nearby city slums and dumped rubbish?

https://www.destinationtips.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/P...

https://smarthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Giza_pyr...

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/view-side-slums-egyptian-pyr...

No one is saying otherwise. I'm sorry, I don't know what your point is.

Not outright saying it (and not you, your comment was just a place to hang another comment off) but parent comments in this chain saying "people already fall for it" about computer adjusted photos and software might adjust how "red the flowers are" or how "green the grass is", and the parent comment saying "you can turn all this off and get RAWs" - as if they believe there is some objective truth which RAWs capture and which cameras used to show that they now don't show because of software post-processing.

My point is that there never has been, cameras have always let you adjust the shot - including "how red the flowers are" by changing light source, film type, shadows, which contrasting other colours are nearby, etc.

It's like airbrushing and similar techniques, except automated. It's better than life (face-smoothing filters, eye-enhancing filters, whitening filters, HDR that blows the colors to make up for the tiny sensor and minuscule optics, major sharpening artifacts, smoothing texture, the list goes on and on)

With old-school photo processing--yes, in a darkroom--you could achieve unrealistic results. But it was a choice. That's not what you got when you sent your negatives to the Costco to get printed. That's akin to the results I get when I use my camera, especially when looking at jpgs straight-out-of-the-camera.

In contrast, we get modern cellphones doing incredible processing to almost arbitrarily replace content with what some algorithm feels you'll like better, whether or not it resembles reality.

I lament that it usually resembles beginner photographer work, where they've just discovered HDR tone-mapping, local contrast, global contrast, saturation, sharpening, and smoothing filters, and promptly slam every single one of them to the stops. I did it, and now I recognize it when I see it in cellphone pics my friends send me via imessage.

Been there, done that. I recognize the stigmata of saturation slammed to the stops and excessive use of HDR and local contrast.

The default is excessive editing now, probably because it helps cover up limitations of tiny sensors and small optics.

The iPhone camera is tuned for realistic color unless you've left the style setting on Vibrant. I guess it doesn't have an "even less vibrant" style.

It does have higher than real contrast, but that's because images are 8-bit - if you don't try to fill the range, it's going to look low quality with banding artifacts.

But it seems to do weird stuff like remove shadows off people's faces.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/06/mkbhd-post-processing-ruining...

Yeah, it exposes people in the foreground differently than the rest of the picture. That's still trying to fit them into 8-bit - basically it's trying to avoid the "black people don't activate soap dispensers" effect where dark skin isn't visible in a dark picture.

Larger cameras don't do that specific one, but they do care about skin in white balance and autofocus, and then photographers expose it specially in Lightroom or with flashes.

It's somewhat overtuned though.