There’s a great discussion going on at Javajive about how much one should manipulate a photo in Photoshop. Check it out.

Brandon’s observation to a comment I made:

Lao-Ocean - An interesting fact about dSLR photography is that quite often an image taken with a point and shoot will actually come out to be more ‘likable’ to an untrained eye. They often have settings which increase saturation, sharpness, and contrast straight from the camera. Often people will boast that their point and shoot takes better pics than an SLR. In many ways, it’s simply doing some of the photoshop work for them, but I’d much rather have the control of doing it myself, as once the camera works it’s magic, you cannot easily go back to what your eyes may have seen. Since you’ve recently stepped over to the dSLR side, did you notice anything like this? Have you found it easier or more difficult to achieve decent results with the XTi?

It shows how much I know about photography, because I never realized that point and shoot cameras “fix” shots before you see them on the viewfinder. It makes sense now. Haven’t you ever taken a photo (even in daylight) and reviewed your picture, only to find that didn’t look quite how your eyes saw it? Maybe the hue of that flower pedal just doesn’t look “right”. I noticed this many times when using a P&S. With my new camera (Canon Rebel XTi), it’s a lot easier to correct pictures to the way my eyes saw them. If you noticed from my Thanksgiving pictures, most of them are washed with a warm, orange hue. It’s because there was no flash, with the lamps and candles as the light sources. I only had to brighten them up a bit, but there definitely would have been a different feel to the pictures if a point and shoot forced flashes on those pictures.