When you take any photograph with a digital camera, the shot is never as it appeared. Technology plays its part, and every camera has different tech.
The most advanced cameras used by professional photographers, shoot in RAW format. To the average person with no photography experience, the RAW image file would be useless. Nothing can be done with it without professional photo editing software.
Consumer-grade cameras shoot in JPEG for a reason. To capture the scene as close to the real thing as you tried to capture. Rarely does it work out that way and that is the point of photo editing. To make your image as close to the real thing, as it looked, at the time the photo was taken. That being said, that is for the photographs that you want to keep around as memorabilia.
For true representations of photos, the Natural History Museum run photographer of the year competitions, in which they only permit limited editing to maintain the integrity of photojournalism and keep photos looking as real as possible.
Permitted adjustments to keep photos representative of the image taken at the time include:
. Adjustments to the camera lens profile
. Altering the colour temperature by adjusting the white balance
. Removing dust spots
. Editing saturation by reducing or enhancing shadows and highlights by changing the whites and blacks in the photo
. Adjusting the contrast
. Sharpening the image for better clarity
. Cropping the photos
In other words, it takes a lot of photo editing for a real photo to actually look real. Cameras cannot capture the moment as you see it.
With how technology is, many of those edits already happen in the background when you tap the shutter button on a smartphone’s camera or a digital camera.
Consumer photo editing can be very little if any at all. The majority of the edits are only required to suit your personal preference. If you feel the image would have been better taken closer, zoom and crop. Software on phones can easily do that.
Removing dust spots that appear because the camera lens wasn’t wiped, which happens frequently for phones kept in pockets, although for those instances, it is more likely to be lint on the lens. Software may be required for that depending on the extent of the spotting.
Colour saturation is where filters come into play. Many modern smartphones have integrated filters that let you adjust saturation and enhance shadows using pre-programmed pre-sets to eliminate the guesswork.
For your personal photos and general images on any digital camera, even the ones that were taken on your smartphone, play around with the pre-sets and your phone's gallery features to see what photo editing pre-sets are available. Much of the time, you can find that modest improvements can be done to photos to enhance their realism without any specialist photo editing tools.
Specialist tools are more for professional photo shoots such as commercial photography that need to represent the best parts of products in the highest quality.
The right photo editing feature or filter could take some of your best memories to a higher quality that you would gladly print and frame instead of limiting them to digital viewing.