The Contrast War

In music production circles there is a concept called ”the loudness war”. The phenomenon that we perceive music that is louder as better has led engineers into a contest of increasing the perceived loudness of the material to a point where its dynamic range is getting compromised and effectively reducing the quality of music overall.
If we translate volume in music to contrast & saturation in the visual arts, we could argue that a similar war is taking place in photography.
We have all, at some time, fallen in love with those sliders that increase the “volume” of an image. I’m talking about contrast, saturation, vibrance, sharpness, clarity etc. Experimenting with those sliders is a lot of fun and can quickly turn any boring photo into a more exciting and energetic one. Early on I too loved such editing techniques and used it to impress friends and family with my out-of-this-world type images. I quickly discovered that I could go even further with RAW, HDR and tonemapping. The clar...