>>3043444Slightly different than what other polarised opinions here say, but not far off.
If you go in with a brush and crank the green/magenta slider all the way to the left in light room, then it's less photography and more digital art/painting. You still had to get the composition right, but it's just a base. I would just call it photomanipulation, since that's an official name for it isn't it.
At the same time, some post work is necessary. This is because the camera has a fixed dynamic range that at times seems wider or narrower than our eyes. So you have to go into levels/curves and clip it sometimes.
The rest can be done inside your camera.
But that's small details.
In the end it will come down to what you value in photography. To me it's about "truth". So in the OP pic, what you showed isn't truth. It's a completely different feeling and statement. So whatever you portray, an emotional portrait, a crazy landscape, whatever, there is an unstated promise there that this happened in real life. This is an aspect of photography that makes it uniquely valuable.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a valid art form if you do a lot of photobashing or whatever. But then the camera is just a stepping stone for your final art. In photography the camera is your main brush and canvas.
