I am sure many purists and photographers used to film, new to digital would argue that a photo processed on a computer is not the original photo. Some may even go as far as exclude it from any kind of competition, or mark it off as art and not photography.

I know this is a discussion causing huge amounts of debate in the photography community. I have very strong feelings about this.

In my mind, there are two basic kind of changes you can make to a photo. The first is to try and enhance it until it resembles the image you saw most closely. The second is to artistically change it to represent the image you felt most closely.

The first is about replication of the truth - about reality as it was. It is a scientific approach (i.e. the camera and post processing are used to reproduced the image as closely as possible to what was observed). The second approach is artistic - it is about using technology to emphasise the feeling experienced when a particular scene was observed. It does not necessarily have to reproduce the colour, form, tecture etc. of the original - the idea is to alter the image so that the aspect(s) that evoked the strongest emotions is emphasised.

My feeling about this is that both approaches are sound and justified. The latter is obviously not part of the debate - everyone agrees that it is art. The first is however the problem. There are many people who believe either no post processing (on the computer) is allowed, or absolutely minimal processing such as exposure adjustments and sharpness is allowed.

The irony here is that any digital camera is a computer. Except when you shoot RAW, usually in camera lots of processing are applied such as sharpening, exposure adjustments, various transformations etc. These processing parameters are usually configurable to some extent, but the principal is that the original data the CCD/CMOS sensor captured is transformed in a very specific way to represent the final image you get when downloading the image from your camera.

Furthermore, if you argue that to obtain unprocessed images, you just shoot RAW you are making a fundamental mistake. A RAW image is useless without interpolation of the effects of the Bayer mask, applying of a non-linear curve etc.

Because of these facts, I believe that any processing you need to apply to the image to reproduce the scene you saw, is justfied. No technique is more fundamental than the other. In other words, in camera processing is not more fundamental than processing a RAW image on the computer, or any image for that matter on the computer.