The straight out of camera fallacy.
I hear the term “straight out of camera” all the time, and I'm not sure most people understand what it implies. They think it means unedited, but what it really means is they are happy with the way it was edited for them.
It doesn't matter what you do to create an image you are excited about, getting excited is the important thing. Straight out of camera or not, take and enjoy and share your images.
But let's talk about what straight out of camera really means.
A truly uninterpreted image, if we could see it, would probably look like a grid of 0s and 1s. Just binary luminosity data from each pixel. But we never see anything like this in reality. What we’re presented with on the back of the camera looks quite different. It looks like what was in front of the camera when we ordered the camera to record the scene.
The first image below is straight out of camera. I haven’t personally altered it, other than importing the file into Lightroom. This second image is the same picture, but I made decisions about the crop, the brightness, the white balance and the saturation. Plenty of global adjustments in this one. If you don’t like the image, that’s on me. But the image feels like what I set out to achieve.
Let's go back to the first version. The data recorded by the sensor must have been processed somehow to create the final image like the second one, right? Those raw zeros and ones are converted for us into something we can see. There must be some translation from the electronic data collected by the sensor to the colors and luminosity of each pixel we see on the screen. That's manipulation. It was manipulated by some engineer working for Canon who programmed my camera long before my picture was taken. Even RAW file previews have a base edit automatically applied where the white balance and color rendition are set.
Saying an image is straight out of camera really means your image was processed by a clever employee of your camera or phone’s manufacturer, and you are satisfied with their guess at interpreting your photograph. It's a guess because the people who created this first pass in-camera preset algorithm have never seen and probably will never see your photograph. Its the same as applying a preset in post production, but it happens automatically in your camera after the shot is taken. And that is absolutely fine. If you like the result, then you are done and that's an efficient way to enjoy your photographs. It's the equivalent of sending your roll of film to a lab and getting prints back.
If you have an alternative opinion on how your photo should be edited than the one dictated by your camera, you can edit it yourself. Takes more time, but you get exactly what you want you picture to look like in the end. And they are all the same decisions that the engineer made in the straight out of camera version.
Photographs are edited either way. We are just choosing if the style belongs to a stranger’s best guess algorithm, or the style is due to your own post production decisions.
I don’t want us to confuse “straight out of camera” with “getting it right in camera”. They are somewhat related; “Getting it right in camera” in its purest form leads to a “straight out of camera” result. Both methods avoid spending unnecessary time at the computer after the image is taken, but “getting it right in camera” means front-loading as many decisions as possible that would otherwise happen in post. It's a form of previsualization. Exposure is the critical one, but also the crop, the white balance, the composition, and for portraits there’s pre-touching, where you check for stray hairs, ruffled clothes, unflattering angles before the shutter button is pressed. Pre-touching avoids time retouching.
“Getting it right in camera” is intentional work up front, whereas "Straight out of camera" means accepting what you are given.
Each approach can work for different people in different situations and can lead to very different results.
I think for a lot of photographers we mix it up depending on the situation. Straight out of camera, intentional post processing and getting it right in camera. Which do you rely on the most?
