What constitutes a "meaningful" difference? If you replace flash-induced red eyes with a more plausible (yet inaccurate) eye color, people are perfectly happy with that, even though the camera indeed saw red photons. They're not happy if you run the exact same algorithm on a photo of someone with genuinely red eyes. It's not always about the "true photons" - the cause of the red eye is relevant, and so is the intent of taking the photo.

"what the human originally taking the photo saw with their naked eye" is a tempting standard, but a misleading one - there might not be a human eye near the camera at all, and at any rate there certainly isn't one co-located with the focal point. And shall we have cameras that render only a few degrees of high resolution color, and have a large-ish blind spot? It's what the human eye sees.