I’m a photographer and imaging specialist. I’ve built capture systems and processing pipelines and projectors. Literally nothing is raw. But do go on.

Thanks for your meaningful, informed, and helpful contribution.

Of course it’s edited. Pro tip: every image is edited. Nothing anyone sees is raw from the sensor. It’s all completely arbitrary. Even people who shoot film show edited photos, they just offload the editing to the film lab. Someone else is doing the processing for them.

Even direct from a digital camera to jpeg, the camera is performing countless transformations and adjustment s before burning to jpeg. See film emulations on Fuji cameras for example.

The entire point of photography is to present to people a compelling vision that feels the way you did when you saw it.

That being said, this is basic curve and a vignette.

It was more to denote the presence of Apple’s processing algorithms, which are possibly part of why people think it’s AI or painted. Lots of people on Reddit thought it was a painting and some pointed to the painterly look of details when zoomed into.

Lots of discussion about that being the result of Apple’s fusion algo, which merges many rapidly taken exposures to eliminate noise, at the expense of real detail.

Here it is several years later. It’s an office that I rent. The landlord apparently does not care about maintaining the windows.

It’s not HDR. It’s a single shot, slightly underexposed so we don’t lose the highlight detail. The rest of the work could have been done in a physical darkroom. But thank you.

It’s several panes of glass. Glass is reflective.