The Myth of the Unmanipulated Image

Funny to have a discussion like this with no explicitly stated reference - when someone says the image is not manipulated, compared to what? If the reference is our own visual system, then the light recorded by the camera is manipulated by an optics system that is different than our own, so the moment the light strikes the front element of the lens, it is being manipulated. If the reference is the sensor or film, (raw data or a negative) then the closest I can figure to having an unmanipulated image is:

which is simply the histogram of the raw data captured from the sensor. Once that data goes through the pipes and spits out an image, it has been manipulated (raw conversion). The histogram tells you nothing about the actual image itself, rather it depicts the distribution of signal captured by the sensor. Place each sensor value in space and then combine the R G G B sensor values into a composite image and you start to get an idea of what the camera "saw" when it captured the data.

Here is that data spit out in a relatively unmanipulated form, with dcraw, untagged linear conversion (converted to aRGB gamma 1.0) and no white balance applied:


(ignoring the manipulation of the data that my MacBook Pro display is performing). Even if you like the content of the image, the image in this form would likely not be useable for display to the public. We, and our cameras in JPEG mode, manipulate this data to make it more pleasing, mapping it to a color space, remapping the tones with a gamma curve and performing a white balance:


Now we can start "manipulating" this image in post to do all of the freaky magic us photoshoppers do, like increasing contrast, boosting lightness, saturation, sharpness, etc. In a scenario in which we want to present a more or less literal interpretation of a scene, all of these manipulations, typically, are performed to bring the light data captured by the sensor into line with what we believe we saw and how our visual systems perceive the world around us. Bring an image to print, and add another layer of manipulation specifically tuned for the output device.

At least that's how I see it.

Kirk