[code4code5]

I tend to boost vibrancy just a little bit... What I should do is play with the in camera color curves and see if one of those presets fits my liking better.

[Pentax_XTC]

I adjust the colors to what I "saw". Not through the viewfinder, but the vision I had when I took the picture. That also means reducing colors as well as bosting them depending on what I want it to be.

[libbyh]

I like to start with what I 'saw' or what the feel I got when I too the shot was. Then I'll run it through a host of changes to see if it sparks any creative ideas. Sometimes the best images come from a completely unexpected treatment of the shot than what I originally had in mind.

[impact]

I almost always boost the contrast, but I actually like the colors ever so slightly desatured most of the time.

So, ideal for me.

[matiki]

Most of the time, I try to have PP only adjust to more closely resemble what I saw with my own eyes. Sometimes that's not the most saturated or contrasty image and I am fine with that. As another post pointed out, it's all an interpretation - even what the camera captures is not "real", it's what the camera's sensor detected at that moment.

[wildman]

Instead of "realistic" I would use the term accurate.

For my kind of shooting the natural light of the scene is almost always more interesting, nuanced and subtle than anything I'm capable imagining and certainly creating. When pushing down on the shutter release my hope is to capture that light in all of it's aspects as accurately as possible.

I know this is counter intuitive but the default of most camera gear is to produce punched up over hyped light. It's easy to do that what's hard is to achieve accuracy.

My photos may be some of the most heavily PP photos on the forum. Not to be creative but simply to achieve a natural accuracy by overcoming the limitations of the hardware. Ironic.

[Marv Toler]

What I want to reproduce is the image my mind saw.

[Inafinus]

I'm dreadful for a heavy PP. But it's just my style that I have developed over the years.

[jasonwarth]

My personal approach is to think of photography as "image-making," rather than "picture-taking."

I lean towards rich, vibrant colors in my work, but enjoy lots of styles other than my own. I have no love for HDR, but not because it looks "un-real,"—just because it looks gross to me.

I like this discussion, but I think it's interesting that color and tonal-value are so often attributed as the determining factors in realism when there are so many other factors at play. Perhaps the other factors (composition, for example) conceal their influence more naturally and are less perceptible without cognitive thought.

Perception = reality, but with most things, that equation is limited to the individual level. One of the unique things about photography is that it provides a rare opportunity for one person's perception to have tremendous influence over other people's reality. That's a powerful notion.

Despite claims to the contrary, I'd argue that very few photographers are truly in pursuit of "realism." Purposefully-composing a shot, using or adjusting the lighting, using make-up, shooting in black-and-white, using anything but an optically-perfect lens (if such a thing exists), choosing to keep one photo while tossing a similar shot—all those steps represent shifts away from reality and towards the photographer's desired perceptions.

Where does one draw the border of "reality," anyway? At the edge of the lens, or at the edge of the image? The world around us is filled with distortion, enhancement, façades, illusions, spin, etc.—so Is a photograph "realistic" if the purposeful-distortions exist solely on the far side of the lens? That answer, it seems, may also be matter of personal perception. ;-)