alt Hacker NewsIt's not really possible to have zero processing of an image. At some point you have to interpret the sensor data and turn it in to a JPEG. The line people decide an image is "processed" is pretty subjective though. It's somewhere between the camera deciding what the white balance / exposure is, and AI replacing the sun with a moon.
The line I draw is at semantic editing. Manipulating images based on abstract geometric or statistical features like edges or color histograms is acceptable. Attempting to guess what those features mean is not. Traditional sharpening, color balance correction, focus stacking, lens distortion correction, etc. is fine. Red eye removal, skin tone correction, traditional dodging and burning, replacing a detected moon with a higher resolution photo, etc. is not. Unlabeled semantic editing is dishonest. AI image processing does not distinguish between geometric and semantic features, so it's always unacceptable, even for simple tasks like sharpening.
The one exception I make is cropping, because photographers have always had the ability to choose where to point the camera. Cropping based on meaning is not dishonest because it's inherent in the process of photography.