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Message:: [QUOTE="-jeffB, post: 1099538, member: 27832"]Careful, there. There's a common conception that a photo captures "reality", and that processing the photo "improves on" or "distorts" that reality. But it's just not so. Every photograph is processed in some way, and every photo is only an approximation to reality. Your camera adjusts brightness and contrast in its image (subject in some cases to manual exposure and aperture settings). It interpolates image detail across its mosaic of color sensors. It performs sharpening (again, sometimes subject to manual control). More importantly, your eye does these same things, whether it's looking at an image or an object. Yes, you can clearly modify an image to make a coin look better than it is. You can also modify an image to make a coin look worse than it is. I would argue that you cannot modify an image to make a coin look exactly as good as it is -- there are too many factors to control, and too many areas of subjectivity. And, if you choose "not to modify an image at all", you're just leaving those decisions up to the camera manufacturer. Which, unless we all use exactly the same cameras, under exactly the same light, with exactly the same settings, doesn't really make things any more "objective".[/QUOTE]