alt Hacker News> There’s nothing that happens when you adjust the contrast or white balance in editing software that the camera hasn’t done under the hood. The edited image isn’t “faker” then the original: they are different renditions of the same data.
Almost, but not quite? The camera works with more data than what's present in the JPG your image editing software sees.
You can always edit the RAW files from the camera, which essentially means working with the same data the camera chip had to generate the JPEGs.