>>3493621>>3493622Like I said, the goal of a photo is to elicit an emotion or feeling. That's the goal of all art, really.
There's one school of thought that the ideal version of a photo is one that the viewer can't tell has been altered. This is a photo I took last weekend, I did a small amount of work on it but tried hard to make it look untouched. To get enough detail in the sky I had to underexpose, but that made the school building too dark, so I had to raise up the shadows. But I liked the darkness of the sky, so I had to use a mask to lighten up ONLY the shadows of the school. There were a few specs of dust on my camera's sensor that I had to clone out in the sky too, and I was slightly off of my framing so I needed to do a tiny bit of keystone correction. Edits were done, but I tried to keep it realistic.
That yellow grass one doesn't necessarily look "real", but it's good at hitting a feeling so I like it. The moon shot imo looks a bit too obviously faked for my tastes, takes me out of the photo. A good double exposure accomplishes the same thing as a composite shot, so it can definitely be done well.That specific photo breaks my immersion, for lack of a better phrase.
That being said, there is an argument to be made that at some point, editing / compositing a photo too much doesn't really "make" it a photograph anymore, but that kind of goes beyond the scope of one 4chan post.
