This is totally incorrect. There’s no such thing as an “unedited” photo: every image is formed through some choice of exposure, depth of field, white balance, and signal processing. If you shoot in AUTO mode, the choices are still made, they’re just made by the camera’s software.
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That software is written to mimic how humans perceive light as much as possible, but human vision is enormously complicated, and algorithms guess wrong pretty often. To illustrate, the image on the left is what my camera produced, and the image on the right is my edited version.
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The edited image does in some ways look better than it looked to me when I was there (mostly due to the extra color sensitivity I mentioned above), but it’s still way closer to how it actually looked than the camera-produced image is. Here, post-processing was needed for realism.
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This is a good illustration of how any attempt to quantify a photo’s “faithfulness” is fundamentally misguided—yes, our eyes detect light, but that isn’t what we SEE. We see scenes (not images) that have been heavily post-processed by our visual cortex in very sophisticated ways.
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When we strive for “realism” in photography, we’re trying to create a 2D image on a computer screen that evokes a response in our brains that’s as close as possible to what we actually perceived while holding the camera, but that’s always going to be a fairly loose approximation.
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This means every photo must “cheat” a bit to mimic aspects of human vision we can’t directly reproduce. For example, blown-out areas desaturate to white, which is the best approximation of “this is really bright” we can get in the dynamic range of a screen (or printed image).
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Whether this cheating is applied by a machine or a human is not a useful criterion for realism. A couple photos I’ve taken (though few) really are extensively edited compared to the camera-produced JPEG. This photo is probably the most extreme example of what that can look like.
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In the final image, I’ve selectively juiced both the exposure and saturation to draw attention to the cat in the center of the frame, and I’ve cropped and straightened things to improve the composition. The second image is arguably less “realistic” in terms of light and color.
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On the other hand, which image does a better job of evoking what I actually *felt* when I was there? Easy: the second one, hands down. The first image does not at all convey the feeling of that place and time, so the “manipulated” image is more faithful to my actual experience.
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To summarize: every photograph has been artistically interpreted somehow. Realism is subjective… some photos look right to me straight out of the camera with no additional adjustments, but others need work. Chances are, you couldn’t even consistently guess which ones are which.
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Yeah! Even without editing and adjustments, the camera is deceptive. You can choose to omit stuff from the frame. Or wait for the right possible time. Take the photo from a specific orientation. Stage stuff. Change the exposure/shutter speed etc.