Funny That Way

Oren got me to thinking the other day. I wonder if you could construct a matrix of all the technical properties of a photograph alongside a general estimation of how much each of those properties matter to people. Because if you could, I think you'd have to record that people are much given to grand arguments about ever more detail from their cameras (lenses, sensors) but would also register as being seriously lacking in concern about accurate color.

If online galleries in general are any indication, then we must live in a neon, day-glo world. I've just visited some galleries chock-full of colors that I'm reasonably certain never existed in nature. Golf courses where the grass looks like tempera poster-paint, a fishing boat so turquoise it would have to have been translucent and lit up from inside in real life to look like it did in the picture, sunsets that "improve" on what the Good Lord intended. It makes me wonder how many people ever bother to really look at the world—with their eyes, I mean—and then make some sort of honest attempt to make their pictures match what they see.

Let a lens or a sensor offer even slightly less than state-of-the-art resolution and detail, and people are all over that like the avenging angels. But then those same people, apparently without a thought, will jack the color ten yards north of realism and shrug—wondering if maybe they shouldn't jack it a little more.

What the world really looks like

The digital photography version

So why do people care so much about technical "accuracy" in some areas and not at all in others? Isn't the look of the world itself a useful reference? Why is inaccuracy in color rendering simply a given, while a little blurring of fine detail resolution or a touch of noise in the shadows are so adamantly not tolerated?

People are funny.

______________________

Mike

P.S. Sorry, but Velvia never looked like this.

Comments

[Barry reid]

Mike,

Not quite there with the after shot. You forgot to add a huge amount of brown, sorry 'warm-up' to the image...

[Fazal Majid]

Digital photography is not to blame for this trend. Why were films like Velvia (or the even more extreme Japan-only Fortia SP) so popular among landscape photographers? Precisely because of their over-the-top saturation, not any notion of color fidelity.

[Kevin White]

I think perhaps the problem is similar to, "Why are movies unrealistic?" Documenting reality is a good use of photography. However, I'm not sure that people want to consume what reality looks like as much as what they consider aesthetically pleasing and stylized. I happen to love high-contrast black and white photography, even though the world is usually much grayer than such photos portray. I suppose it's the difference between "Bose" and "audiophile", but that analogy has some flaws. Or maybe not... Bose fans probably often like what they hear, but someaudiophiles tend to hear the 'time smearing' caused by their power cables. (That's an exaggeration for a point.)

I think that in addition to wanting to see what things should look like, people tend to assume that "better and bigger" is important. An image should be more sharp, larger, more pixels, etc. Kind of a left-brain rationality in a world where progression forward means not falling behind.

Color has an emotional weight that pixels do not, and so "better color" is something that gets turned into "color that pops".

[All Day Breakfast]

You: "Why is inaccuracy in color rendering simply a given, while a little blurring of fine detail resolution or a touch of noise in the shadows are so adamantly not tolerated?"

In my opinion there isn't a contradiction here, they both actually speak to the same issue/problem: so many photographers have nothing else to say photographically except to make a "pretty picture" with impact. I call it Calendar Art.

IMO, people with little or no background in "Art" find these kinds of shots with high dynamic range and tack sharpness very likeable because
a) they intuitively understand the subject matter and
b) they can sense the impact of the 2 techniques and thus can finally have an emotional reaction to something being presented as "Art". This of course runs counter to most people's reaction to modern art (I don't get it... what's it about... no I don't have an emotional reaction to this "Art", I don't even know what I'm seeing..." or some permutation of that like "my kids can do better than this").

With this analysis both "tack sharpness" and so called High Dynamic Range images are part of the same toolkit. They're perfect for the so called democratisation of photography through Flickr and photoblogs, etc. Without having anything to say, a photographer can use these two tools (HDR and sharpness) to create images which seem to have an "Artistic" quality yet are understandable and elicit an emotional reaction. Technicolor didn't make for better films but it was much easier to market than Wild Strawberries for the same reason.

I think the equivalent of these two techniques in the artworld is the revival of 8x10 photography among so called serious artists. I've heard Joel Meyerowitz (and I really respect Meyerowitz) say something to the order of "...if you want your photos to have real impact, you have to work in large format" No wonder Robert Frank has moved to a remote area in Canada.

Eric

[Carl Weese]

Just a theory, but I had a thought back twenty-some years ago when super-saturated slide films were introduced, Fuji Velvia leading the way, and color negative films with hyped up saturation also appeared. It occurred to me that people wanted their color photographs to look like the most important visual experience in their lives--the TV screen. "Accurate" color became what things looked like on the tube, not what you could observe out in the world with your own eyes.

Digital capture allows for very subtle color interpretation, but it sure isn't what most people use it to do.

[Matthew Miller]

I think it's at least partly because the brain is so good at normalizing color -- we've got built-in auto balancing. This means that looking at color objectively takes both intentionality and practice. Meanwhile, sharpness and detail are easy to latch onto, and noise looks unnatural to anyone.

[Grega]

I believe the problem is with "real color as we see it" in the first place. We don't have a built-in spectrometer in our heads. Our eyes sense information and the brain cooks it. And it cooks it quite a bit. Among other things it adjusts hue and saturation and it is totaly off as far as wavelenght is considered. Not to mention you can "see" magenta, which does not really exist in real world. And you can't tell the "yellow yellow" from the "red-green yellow" etc.
So its a scam in real life and photography too.

[Geoff Wittig]

I think it's the Velvia effect, compounded by the ease of simply jacking up the saturation of digital images. Back in the days of film, some emulsions were marketed as more "realistic". They were thoroughly pummeled in the market by the Velvia juggernaut. Everybody loves those neon lavender/coral sunsets, that glowing green foliage.

I personally can't stand the current "aesthetic" (if you can call it that) of neon digital color you see at one website after another. It just strikes me as gaudy or tacky. Stephen Johnson is an articulate advocate of using digital tools to represent the beauty of nature the way it truly is, rather than tarting it up with digital rouge and lipstick.

Many of us got comfortable dealing with the color flaws and biases of various slide films. Digital has its own quirks and variables, but it's probably easier to get a fairly accurate color palette out of digital than film.

[Max]

She's Funny That Way, wasn't that the name of a blues song beautifully picked by Rev. Gary Davis?

[Gordon Buck]

OK to desaturate (B/W) but not to saturate?

[Joe Lipka]

You missed the captions. First, "This is your world." Second, "This is your world on Photoshop."

[Mike Johnston]

"OK to desaturate (B/W) but not to saturate?"

You tell me.

Mike J.

[Ken White]

I don't think there is much mystery here. At least in the United States we are surrounded by over saturated hyped advertising images everywhere you look. It's a natural influence on the way people view the world. True color fidelity is not about the information captured on film or sensor it's about the perception of the individual viewing the image. I don't think most people think of photographs as straight documentary representations of reality. As we all know photographs are not reality.

[christian]

My feeling is that digital is changing our visual vocabulary and understanding faster than we can comprehend. The unrealistic representation of the world with b&w and color film was something we got used to over a fairly lengthy period of time. Film photography is limited by chemistry and physics, digital on the other hand is a construct, that up to this point, has tried to mimic film photography. Any day now, or perhaps already, the collective memory of film photography will fade, and digital will take off in some direction that at this point is hard to imagine. I keep thinking that these questions of sharpness, saturation etc. are not so much technical questions as philosophical concepts, which most photographers and the viewing public don't even begin to understand.

[Nick]

I feel it isn't so much the camera as it is the settings with which the camera processes the RAW file to jpg. And should the camera fail to oversaturate the raw file, there is always Photoshop. Colorperception, I think, is to subjective and not technical and measurable enough to get the measurebaters really started. Also the limited dynamic range in most digicams might make colors look 'hard' due to a lack of subtlety in tonal transitions.

Two books come to (my) mind when thinking about beautiful colors: Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places and William Eggleston's guide. I have often tried to recreate those subtle colors with my digital camera and photoshop but haven't nailed it yet. Any suggestions anybody?

[Scott Dommin]

If your world really looks as dull and "un-colorful" as your top photograph, I feel sorry for you. The real world may not be as bright and garish as you see in some galleries (mine included), but your top example is just as wrong in the other direction.

[Mike Johnston]

"but your top example is just as wrong in the other direction"

How would you know? I was there; you weren't.

Mike J.

[Jeremy Cherfas]

"How would you know? I was there; you weren't."

I'm with you on this, but I do have a question: did you take a print out into the yard for a quick comparison, or were you remembering the colours of the scene?

[Schmuell]

Maybe people just need a unit to measure (and compare) colour accuracy.

Like lw/ph, distortion percentages, pixels of lateral chromatic aberration, stops of vignetting.

Some "qualified" "praise" of colour accuracy on an internet forum by some "guru" might also help.

Cheers,
Schmuell

[Brian White]

I like the analogy to the TV. I found it interesting that when I purchased my first flat panel TV last month that I discovered it had 3 image settings; vivid, standard, and movie. Vivid has alot of initial impact.
The movie setting is much more subtle and pleasing when you are in a contemplative mood. Which has me thinking about how TV and movie videography has become phrenic and designed for what I call jack hammer stimulation. I feel that the vivid setting on the TV monitor and the way alot of digital color looks has a similar effect. It is designed for maximum sensory impact and quickly move on for more stimulation. Not for contemplation or thought provoking more like a drug fix.

[Andrew]

Our eyes register colours in relation with the surrounding ones, and artists for a long time have realised this.

This picture (http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=1312&searchid=9571&tabview=image) by Bonnard, surely one of the masters of colour features, what appears to be a red and white table cloth, yet study the picture and white is probably the only colour not on the cloth. There are greys, blues of various dull shades, but given their relationship with the red we see them as white, and furthermore, bright

[Andrew]

Interesting as always Mike. I am of the "do not care about noise and like natural colours" school. Recently, however, I have been developing a web site to advertise a holiday house for rent. I have built some galleries and made a conscious decision to go "poppy" with the pictures as they will bring more instant gratification. A few that are more subtle (mostly on last page) are more natural but that is me failing to give in to my commercial instincts. See http://andrewh.smugmug.com/gallery/4439708_3LSRp/1/260914968_QPBUV

Mmm.. I think it is down to: at whom are the pictures are targetted? In my case it is customers who are not in the least bit interested in the artistic merit of my pictures (What artisitc merit you may ask :-) )

Andrew

[charlie d]

Happy, carefree people(tourists & landscape photogs) who are comfortable in life prefer saturated color. Emotionally withdrawn and uncomfortable people attempting to make art prefer de-saturated color.

"Normal" color is for people who spend too much time worrying about being misunderstood and lumped in the "wrong" color group. That and corporate head shots.

:-)

[Michiel]

You must hate infrared photography.. (he said jokingly)

[Nicolas]

"So why do people care so much about technical "accuracy" in some areas and not at all in others?"

I also feel the need to point out that without a spectrometer (notice I didn't say "colorimeter" ;o) we just can't assess color with any accuracy.
Our brain is so efficient to drift the white point anywhere in a few seconds...

Add to that the variability among individuals (specially in the trichromacy area, where some people may respond differently to the trichrome "imitation" of a given color on a monitor), and I find the 2nd picture a tad over the top, but globally rather more realistic (unless there was a fair amount of fog? sir yes sir, I wasn't there) than the first one.

I'd guess it would print a bit better too, losing maybe the right amount of saturation, but that's another story! No, we're not supposed to publish soft-proofed versions of our images.

[Paul Mc Cann]

Ken White "I don't think there is much mystery here. At least in the United States we are surrounded by over saturated hyped advertising images everywhere you look. "

I think there is a kernel of truth there. Certainly my "European " eyes can spot an American magasine from across the room and if I google for a product can generally tell the American sites from their appearance.

But is the question not one of do you want photo-realism or photo art? Gaugin, van Gogh et al certainly liked their vivid colours.

I think the people who picky picky at image detail have little real interest in the aesthetics of the actual image.

[Tim Parkin]

I'm not defending over saturation or using films like Velvia in the wrong conditions but some research suggests that Velvia more represents how we remember things than more 'realistic' films.

It turns out we have an inbuilt tendency to recollect colours as more saturated than they really were. And we also tend to remember 'ideal' colours for things that we know the colour of - e.g. we know the sky is blue and we know blue is quite saturated so if we remember the sky being blue it will be a saturated blue even if it wasn't that saturated in real life.

I think the Fuji engineers had used some of this research (as well as the fact we *like* saturated colours) when developing Velvia..

Here are some interesting articles

Choosing highest saturation for color name
http://www.humboldt1.com/~cr2/colors.htm

Article About Memory Color
http://www.isisimaging.com/MemoryColorPaper.pdf

Accuracy of Hue and Saturation recall
http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=v96l1008

[Ivan]

It's precisely because people are always looking at the world through their eyes that they have the desire to re-interpret it. It's called storytelling, participatory dishonesty. Even the total novice who does nothing more than crank the saturation on their soccer pictures is trying to tell you a little something about themselves, however gauche you may find it.

The real liars are the photographers who add and subtract elements from a scene and, when asked, deny that they did so.

[Chris]

I think the internet is partly to blame for the Disneyland color that seems to be the rage at the moment. Had you posted your exmaple shots at PBase or Flickr, the first would have gotten comments along the lines of "Dull colors," and the second, "WOW! Great Color!"

It's amazing to go through looking at autumn galleries and look at colors so saturated that there's no detail at all left. Yet, those shots are still the ones that get lots of positive comments. I can't help but think of the line from the Barenaked Ladies song, "Brian Wilson":

"Ring a bell and I'll salivate. How'd you like that?"

Is this all a big Pavlovian experiment on photographers?

[Bron Janulis]

Mike,

The top one looks like late summer in the upper midwest. Then my reaction was to say "poor doggy, what a short leash."

Probably some form of dyslexia, an inability to stay focused on the topic at hand.

Personally, I prize accuracy, look for it in reviews; but that also has to do with what I'm taking the photos for. Color accuracy is important for photos of paintings and frames. That attitude does extend to the occasional "objet d'art" photo I produce.

Meanwhile, poor doggy.

Bron

[Thiago Silva]

Well, I am one of the fans of strong color, saturation an contrast. For me, these characteristics indirectly evoke the feelings I had when looking at those landscapes. Our eyes perceive much more detail, shape, depth, not to mention the synergy with the other senses, creating a much more intense experience when we are looking at the "real" scene.

The brain can't interpret a photo the same way it interprets the real thing; most of the sensory cues are gone. It will then look bland compared with the memory of the event. In the end, I think it is a matter of the photographic goal: a faithful reproduction of the image vs. a faithful reproduction of the feeling.

[Donovan Rieger]

I might be somewhat older than those talking about the "Velvia Effect: to me it is the "Kodachrome Effect". And that started long before color television. People like photos of the world as it might be in their mind. But move off color for a moment-what about high key or low key photographs, or very dark and somber images. I think the archives are full of photos that "represent and interpret" the scene being photographed. I visited an art museum last week with a very good show of impressionistic paintings by most of the masters of that form. They were highly criticized in their day.

[Tom]

So how do you classify this?

http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2007/video-surreal-edgy-effect/

[Kevin McLoughlin]

An over-saturated world is not just the preferred habitat of many photographers.

Year on year tv presenters, newsreaders etc are taking on an increasingly cartoonish quality. The default output seems to be blindingly white teeth, bright orange complexions and studio sets which seem to be in some most gaudy and garish competition.

The tv sets themselves seem to be no better. I had occasion to buy a new tv recently and had to spend a considerable length of time toning the 'factory' settings of saturation, contrast and brightness down to a level that vaguely resembles a world that I recognise.

[Joe]

For years, our mantra as photographers has been to 'wait for the light' when shooting in the natural environment.
Other than photojournalists who are bound to the pulse of action before their lens, this dictate has served us well in terms of dramatic light direction, light quality, light's color hues, saturation, etc..
Using your two example photos, the first non-enhanced image would not have drawn my interest at the time of day you created it. However, a little later in the afternoon when the sun had dropped low enough on the horizon to have picked up another 30 points of yellow and given the surrounding foliage that vibrant 'pop'... well, now we have the possibility of a more resonant image.
In this modern era of immediate gratification and little patience, the Saturation and Vibrance sliders in Photoshop/Lightroom have given every photographer the ability to become 'Master of the Universe', and the world can forevermore be pictured during 'best light' TOD, regardless of hands on a clock.
The genie is out of the bottle, and the course of postmodern image-making will follow its own path 'into the sunset'.

[Michael]

The second picture may not be true to life but I prefer it to the first, just my opinion others may differ.The whole theory of beauty in nature is a human construct nature is not concerned with beauty.The digital camera and the computor plus photoshop has enabled people to take/manipulate/exhibit their photos to a woldwide audience and judging by the results most people prefer the world a little more colourful than nature's version maybe this is not a bad thing?

[iacas]

I wrote my full answer here (below). I sent a TrackBack, but it hasn't gone through, so I'm commenting.

http://nslog.com/2008/03/06/saturation_and_accuracy_in_photography

The only "true" basis for comparison we have is our memory of the scene. Just as we're allowed to adjust the white balance of a scene to more "accurately" reflect our memory of that scene, I say we're allowed (to a point) to adjust the saturation of a scene.

I also think the point about Black and White is valid. We don't see in black and white, so if adding saturation makes something less accurate, then so does de-saturating. And what about using filters? Clearly those creat "inaccurate" images, too, because the camera couldn't have darkened those skies without that graduated neutral density filter or seen through those reflections without that polarizing filter.

Our eyes and brains are wonderful machines. They make the world look better. They adjust local contrast. They saturate. They adjust to changes in light temperature. Our memory is the "truth." Making images match that is not making them less accurate, but more so.

[Jeff K]

I have 3.5 thoughts on this:

My first is that the creation of artistic photographs has often pushed the materials beyond what they really looked like if processed straight. Ansel Adams used the zone system to compress and expand contrast ranges dramatically for effect, often to bring out the feeling he was experiencing at the time of exposure from the scene. In some cases it made the photos much less realistic (the black skies in "Moonrise over Hernandez" or "Monolith" comes to mind) but much more powerful at the same time. I don't fault him for that since I have seen his alternative prints without the dramatic effect and they are much less compelling, less artistic, etc...

My second thought is that sometimes (ironically perhaps in this conversation)the people pushing the color to unnatural levels are trying to mimic some version of ideal light, such as the warmer light that comes when the sun is low in the sky that often makes colors look much more vibrant. Judging from the photos above, that light might not ever hit those trees in that way if they are surrounded by even more trees...but under the right circumstances, they might. Returning to Ansel Adams again, his shots of Aspen trees that have been widely seen used darkroom techniques to raise the brightness of the leaves and the lighter side of the tree trunks. Is that what our eyes would have seen? No, but it sure works to bring an impact to the photos.

Finally, I wonder if people would have such a problem with this color boost if it wasn't so easy to do. Using my above two examples, the vast majority could not take photos and have them look like Ansel's because his skills in the darkroom allowed him to do things that were beyond most people who dropped their film off at the drug store and pick up the prints a couple days later. But, today nearly anyone with even a basic knowledge of photoshop could perform a few simple steps to convert to black and white and boost contrast, or perhaps just boost color to give a different, more powerful feel to a photo. Do they look less natural - yes, but do they look more interesting? sometimes...

And that maybe brings us back to many others comments. The beauty of the world is vast, but not everyone has the opportunity to sit and wait for the perfect light, or the talent to create it straight out of the camera. Does that make it cheating or bad that they are using some artistic prerogative in the computer? Not to me, as long as they still have something of interest to say with the photo.

To me...
We don't turn to art to see the world, we turn to art to feel something.

[Franta]

I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that resolution can be easily measured or estimated but colour fidelity is much more difficult to quantify. So you can say: 'this is better because it has 20% more lppm' but you cannot say 'the color fidelity index is 20% higher on this'.
This quite apart from the fact that maybe people just prefer over-saturated colours and there's nothing wrong with that.

[Terry Moore]

I think it comes from resolution and noise being easy to measure. If you take a pic of a bird it's easy to look at the feathers and see if the barbs are clear. But, was the bird this shade of green or this more intense and saturated green?

[Dominic]

Mike, although I don't disagree with your argument how can you be sure it's the same people carping as over saturating? In line with other posts I agree this is the logical extension of the Velvia + filtration paradigm - particularly prevalent in many conventional landscapes. Is this also a phenomenon because most people can detect sharpness and noise but with uncalibrated monitors are all experiencing slightly different viewing experiences? Or do they simply want to reproduce the hideous hues of plasma screens – is television/advertising influencing our general visual sophistication and appreciation?

[Dierk]

In short: There is no 'accurate' colour [reproduction]. At least not in any meaningful way.

Sure, you can physically measure the colours in the scene and then adjust the photo file until the values are as close a fit as possible - for monitor as well as printing. But that's not how we perceive colours. It's even less how we use colour [or any other characteristic of an image or sound spectrum]. We go for effect. That can be surreal but need not be.

The really unfortunate development is that many people seem to think blinding 70s pop-art colour is always good. Well, this differentiates the true craftsmen and artist from the hobbyist and holidayist: Using a technique to elicit an effect.*

*A linguistic explanation is in order: 'Effect' as I use it here means the emotion elicited by the viewer [or listener]. In the vernacular 'effect' often means the technique as applied to a photo etc. The latter is probable better called 'special effect'.

[Charlie H]

Most digital cameras today, it seems, can produce very accurate colors, given the appropriate settings. I take it this may not be the case with S5. What color representation people choose is another question. However, where color is essentailly a variable givens todays technology, resolution, is not. Certainly, if a given camera has a tendency to reproduce greens for blues, it would not be toleratated. ch

[Ron H]

When I first started shooting RAW, I got bland images. Undersaturated and poor contrast. Coming from JPG, it seemed like a lot of work to get a satisfactory result.

It took several months of trial and error before I was able to get to a place where my RAW interpretations felt superior to the default JPG.

During that time I began to learn restraint. I hadn't initially realized that Lightroom's defaults were purposefully bland. While at first this was disappointing, in time I was glad that it was that way.

When you have to coax saturation and contrast from your images, you begin to appreciate the subtlety, the interplay between the various elements. If I hadn't been forced to start from there, I may not have ever begun to learn the difference.

At the risk of sounding (even more?) pretentious, I'll say that appreciation of photographic subtlety is comparable to an appreciation of wine (or just about any other gourmet food or drink). At first, it's all pretty much the same. A novice will be able to recognize the difference between categories, perhaps, but all but the grossest of differences will be lost. Only after repeated exposure will your palate begin to expand.

Without a palate that recognizes nuance, what's "better" comes down to which is more flavorful, not that which is more well-balanced.

[William Carter]

Technicolor; (originally) a three strip primary color recording on B&W film base and it's subsequence dye transfer, could actually capture and display a far more representational image of the "real" world than other technique, past or present. Kinda' like vinyl vs. CD, or tube vs. IC's, or "Mercury" vs. "Vanguard"... I had a friend, with the very best top-end equipment, who often monitored his mixes through cheap car speakers. In those cases he mixed mostly mariachi or pop music; he knew his audiences end environment.

The name of the game in theater, film, sound recording, photography, even the "Mystic Arts", has fundamentally been the "suspension of disbelief"... The closer you can get some (always) artificial and subjective product like, a photographic print to recreate a mythic reality, then the closer you are to communicating your own personal sense of "truth"... remember the days when you could get paper with enough silver to actually take your breath away... Wow!

Some say my prints have hyper-saturated color. As it turns out, I'm somewhat color-blind. To me, my prints are spot-on. I only note there's a difference from the norm when I take color-chart tests. But, probably, that's a different story :-)

Jack the color "ten yards north of realism", and what do you have? To me, color prints can only be a sub-standard (as in a REALLY sub-standard) representation of what I consider to be the "real" world... I'll let my imagination fill in the missing bits... the color information which may seem too saturated. And, I'll let my imagination fill in the in-betweens... of those colors which appear to me totally missing.

And, Dang-it! I love the soft pastel color of South Florida Deco turned brilliant Day-Glo on 'CSI-Miami'! Not "real" in any sense. But Dang! A bright fresh way of looking at it.

[Gilbert]

I think that photography has finally reached the same stage as art. We now have the tools to render reality anyway we wish. When Impressionism first appeared many people said what Mike has written about. But the color of an image is decided only by the artist or photographer. The other reason for color changing comes from workshops. The instructors always say that you have to add to the colors to make a realistic image. As for fuzziness, again not all artists try to have straight sharp lines. Why should we be any different.

[Chuck Kimmerle]

I'm not sure this is all that important of an issue, to be honest. The basic problem is a combination of two things. First, most people don't really know, or think about, how to propery interpret the scene while they're shooting it. They're not thinking about that until it's on the screen, which leads to the second problem....Photoshop let's us do anything we want. It's the equivalent of pixel anarchy. Every many for himself, no rules. Of course people go overboard. Most of us cannot help ourselves.

As for shadow noise, that's a separate issue. Many of us, myself included, hate it for the simple reason that it's a foreign substance within our images. Artificial artifacts over which we have little control.

Both issues are control related. One where we have too much, the other where we have too little. We're a spoiled lot, we are.

[Mathias Tornqvist]

Reality has some huge advantages against a photograph attempting to depict it. It fills your whole field of vision, as opposed being a tiny part of it. It's stereoscopic, not flat. Dynamic range is much bigger. The amount of detail is staggeringly superior. And you can interact with reality!
When you add in other sensory cues, like smells, sounds, temperature, etc, the battle gets even less fair.

To get anything near the emotional impact of reality, a photographer has to cheat. Composition, crop, lens choice, and, yes, color treatment, are some of the few tools we have at our disposal when we try to approximate the emotional impact. Nothing wrong with that.

[Zaan]

My eyes have a higher dynamic range than the sensor in my camera. Therefore I sometimes use Photoshop to try and re-create what I think I saw.

[Jeff Hartge]

WRT the pictures in this post...
For me, the subject has so much information that it demands that I visually scan the picture part by part and not simply step back and enjoy it as a whole. The second image appears to have some level of brightness/contrast adjustment to the benefit of such a viewing process. Perhaps if you desaturated it a little and offered that as the alternative (to focus on color only).

WRT the argument at hand...
I would agree with Eric. Color is difficult to talk about and understand. Resolution is easy.

What boggles my mind in the resolution discussions is where would you display full-resolution images that come from a 25Mpx camera? Am I the only person who doesn't live in a McMansion? A 16x20 with mat and frame kills an awful lot of wall space!

Jeff