With no disrespect to photographers, but it doesn’t matter how good the master shot is every photo must eventually go through editing in post.
It’s all started when the Saint Kenneth site launched and I browsed through the photo collections that I noticed something. That somebody the photos we had put up on the site were too washed out. Maybe it was was from the scanner but the colors weren’t as vibrant as the originals. I brought up my concerns about it, not by actually saying anything but by taking a screencap of the image from the site and modifying it myself.
After showing the result to my boss he agreed that the photos were not as good as they thought. He even commented that my modified images were even better that the originals, but I had to stress that I was only putting the color that was washed out from the camera flash. That is if the camera made the model too pale I had to put the color back on her skin. So he had Dan send all the images to me and I corrected them and now they’re on the site. And I can finally rest easy knowing that sub-optimal work won’t be displayed on the site.
Here’s an example on the left of how the camera can wash out the colors and on the right is an example of putting the pink back into the sky.