Amazing editing power by the software. Do the current digital cameras, phones, tablets, etc. mean that no photograph they produce can be considered “real” as they are all modified somehow by the camera itself before reaching the memory location?
Just a random I dunno question without malice intended.
A fun question.
I posit photography has never been “real” in this sense. No matter the technology the image the camera captures is not the same as the light coming off of the subject.
And… while we’re at it, does everyone see the image the same way? Not likely, so your “reality” and my “reality” are already different. “Deep Thoughts”.
Ahhh. Just like stereo playback equipment. 
Deep thoughts indeed. Everyone’s reality is completely different from everyone else’s but here we all are - (I think).
You all are just constructs in my reality.
With film a lot of post processing work was done in the physical darkroom. Now the physical darkroom has been replaced by the digital one. It still depends a lot on the skill of the operator.
There’s a fowl Kentucky fried, border cross the road joke in there somewhere…
Chickens are just cool lookin creatures.
We had Bantam Chickens growing up.
“How many eggs you want in your omelette?”
“Nine!”
The JPEG’s produced by most cameras are generally optimised for social media, saturation, sharpening, etc. Plus you can do further editing of your own. Some phones will store raw and you can process on the phone using, for example, Lightroom.
The RAW file is the basic unedited data read by the sensor that gives you maximum editing flexibility. Once the camera produces a jpeg file, the editing thereafter is limited.
Jpeg files also compress the RAW data.
When you preview an 8mage, you are looking at the jpeg file.
Cameras and some phones can store RAW and jpeg at the same time. It’s useful if you want to send a file quickly without having to edit. Leica have always had a facility to generate a black and white jpeg because many Leica users convert RAW to black and white and want to see the image in a black and white preview.
Regardless of how the data is stored and/or manipulated, once light goes through any lens in any camera it has already inherently modified from “real.”
Lenses modify the apparent relationships between objects, geometry, shapes, add focal planes, turns three dimensional objects into two dimensional facsimiles. etc. The lens than sends this along to the storage medium (analog or digital) which further distorts the image as it attempts to interpret the light the lens has passed on.
This does not man that photography is an any way “bad.” But, like audio, no photograph is correctly captures the image before it. Every photograph is an interpretation.
Even what we see with the naked eye is not real. It’s an image 
Is what we sense real? is an amusing question philosophy first took up over two thousand years ago.
The really cool thing is what our brains do with the incoming data.
“Vision and Art - The biology of seeing” by Margaret Livingstone is an interesting read.
That does look to be an interesting read. Thanks!
Here’s an interesting side note to that thought. My mother is slowly going blind from a form of Parkinson’s disease. I spent a couple of years taking her to various eye doctors and other optical specialists trying to find a solution for her slowly degrading vision. It turns out that there is nothing wrong with her eyes, lenses or optic nerves. After visiting a neurologist with expertise in brain diseases we found out that the disease is degrading the area of the brain that interprets what the eyes have delivered. To her all of the images are out of focus enough that she is effectively blind. She describes it as if you barely open your eyes enough to let light in but not be able to focus on what you are seeing.
Sorry to hear about your mom’s condition.
Our senses and how they interact with our brain is just fascinating.
Thanks for the kind words. She is taking it pretty well considering that she is in a long term care facility and due to covid they have not allowed visitors since March.
I wonder if everyone “sees” a different version of the same image due to the individual brain’s interpretation. I know that our individual memory functions are all different and are not very reliable when pressed to accurately remember events in an unbiased way.
Her situation is difficult at best. Best wishes to her and to you.
Thanks @Elk