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.
You can still carefully choose which renditions you want to put out to the public to manipulate people’s perceptions. The video of the uber self-driving car hitting a person being an example that comes to mind, where the video released by uber looks far darker than how human would typically perceive the same street while driving, which led to a lot of “even a human driver would have hit them” apologia. So even if "fake’ isn’t technically accurate, its still lying to the naive viewer.
Regardless, cool breakdown of what does into making digital photography work at a basic level.
You can still carefully choose which renditions you want to put out to the public to manipulate people’s perceptions. The video of the uber self-driving car hitting a person being an example that comes to mind, where the video released by uber looks far darker than how human would typically perceive the same street while driving, which led to a lot of “even a human driver would have hit them” apologia. So even if "fake’ isn’t technically accurate, its still lying to the naive viewer.
Regardless, cool breakdown of what does into making digital photography work at a basic level.