Actually no, a good photographer knows the limits of the sensor and exposes in a way that the best result can be achieved in editing. Depending on what is your style and subjects you will tend to either over- or underexpose. If you overexpose you get better overall picture quality but if you have extreme highlights in the picture you need to underexpose the rest to still get the information in the highlights. Because your eyes do see them as our vision is put together in our brain. The same was done with film by the way, when developing film and bringing it onto paper the same manipulations were done, actually many features in Photoshop are named after processes that were used in film development because they did digitally what labs did analogue.

No, that's how a pro photographer takes photos. You want the interesting things in the photo to fall within the camera's dynamic range. Minimize blown out highlights, and crushed shadows. The *last* thing you want is for the photo to be "properly exposed" straight out of the camera. You want to give yourself a little buffer space on the highlights and shadows, so if you mess up slightly the photo isn't ruined. Stuff like this is easy enough to fix in post processing (auto levels in Photoshop). Same was true in film photography (except slides). Negatives had like 7 stops of leeway for overexposure, but slightly underexposing was fatal. So you always tried to err on the side of overexposing. (Slides were the opposite, having no leeway for overexposure, and fixing it in post processing required taking another photo of the slide.)

I've got multiple years as a professional photographer having worked in photojournalism for much of that, but also done all sorts of artistic photography. What you want out of the camera is a rather flat image so that you don't have blocked blacks or blown whites. Then you can make all sorts of decisions in post, rather than being stuck with an image that can't really be adjusted. Heck, that's almost the entire appeal of shooting RAW, which is what most pros do whenever possible. Beyond that, the sensor on cameras essentially see only B&W, with overlays that help separate that into colors based on algorithms run by the camera. So, even the picture coming out of the camera has been post-processed by the time you see it. None of this is really different than what used to be done in darkrooms, it's just that the whole process is now handled by computers. I laugh every time I hear someone proudly assert that they shot some picture "without filters." There is no such thing with digital.

I do not agree, and I am a professional photographer. Sometimes it just isn't reality. Yes a good photographer doesn't always need to do that but not everyone has the time and resources to wait for the perfect moment when everything lines up for the perfect shot (weather for example)

Editing is absolutely necessary. Your camera does some of it (it's a computer, after all, with a B&W sensor that gets turned into color by camera software), you can (and often should) do more with Photoshop. Some photographers have to try and capture reality - that is the essence of photojournalism. For everyone else, the photographer's vision or the vision of the person who is paying them, is the only thing that matters.

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, it's because I feel (slightly) misled. I came here looking for interesting photos that were maybe tweaked a little, not for photos that are really quite different from their originals. For many, there's a line between an actual photograph and a piece of art that has been fabricated. For me, a lot of these photos fall down on the side of the latter. I'm not knocking it, but it's not why I'm here.