My daughter and I were talking about a class she’s in where the professor strongly discourages post-processing work on the images they’re making. It’s a common refrain in a lot of instructional materials aimed at photographers and filmmakers.
I get the point. The intention is to make you think while you’re making an image. There are things you can’t fix later on. If your composition is really off, you can’t do much about that. If your focus is fundamentally on the wrong point, you can’t fix that. If your image is massively overexposed, you can’t recover what’s in the blown-out highlights. If it’s horribly underexposed, there’s only so much you can bring back up.
As a doctrine, I think it is like a lot of what people teach early on in artistic work: it’s a rule that will eventually be routinely broken. I took a foundational drawing class from a colleague once and I thought he put it well—if you break rules early on and don’t know that you’re breaking them, you can’t reproduce an effect or a technique that you like because you don’t know how you did it. If you just start playing with sliders in Photoshop, Lightroom or Premiere without knowing what they are, really, or how they relate to the decisions you made (consciously or otherwise) while shooting, you’re not making decisions.
But honestly, I do run into people who are too rigid about this point, either as a teaching doctrine or as an aesthetic rule that they follow. It’s not just about digital tools, either: most of the major photographers and film-makers of the last century have dodged and burned or otherwise fiddled with the original product of camera work.
These are close to being the same composition of a landscape image of Lake Harris, in the Adirondacks. (The last shot is slightly different.) What’s different is largely as a result of post-processing. I don’t know which I like best (none of them are classics, but they’ll do) and there’s everything right and nothing wrong with being able to fiddle around this way after the fact of taking the shot. Rigid discomfort with doing so is an indicator that someone is too wedded to the idea of the photograph (or the film’s) fidelity to “things as they really were”. It’s not common that people are that rigid, but even being close to that mark is a mistake.
Even more fundamental than dodging and burning, "develop for the highlights" is post-processing. Choosing the (print) exposure time and dialing in the contrast with variable contrast paper is exactly the same type of adjustment that the Levels and Curves tools provide, although the digital versions give more possibilities. I get the aversion to "Photoshopped" images, even subtle moves like erasing an unwanted bystander in the background, but I think global adjustments and cropping should always be OK. Our eyes can see perhaps 10 stops at once; photography has always had to deal with compressing that into the 5 or 6 stops that a print can display.