New College Lane, Oxford

Looks like it's had the dingy treatment. Is that the effect you call 'painterly'?

Again, no. The sky has been darkened slightly but no special effects were applied. This was not taken in Summer; under cloudy skies in late December scenes like this do in reality look slightly dingy.

Unless you are suggesting, that is, that I falsify the image to make it look as though it was taken in bright sun under a blue sky.

I really don't know what you do to them sometimes.

This was taken under cloudy skies in late January.
www.ipernity.com/doc/isisbridge/51450578

And mine by comparison is "dingy"?

Mine is dark, not dingy.

It's both.

No, it's quite crisp. Doesn't have that drab and dreary effect.
Are you sure you haven't done anything to it?

Yes, I am sure. It was developed in Photomatix using the "Balanced" preset, which produces the most natural effect.

I can't see the problem. To my eye, this looks very natural for a picture taken in the lighting conditions. If anything it's slightly brighter and crisper than it was in reality.

Ah, so you have used some kind of 'effect'?

In most RAW developers, there are presets intended to give a certain "look" - Painterly, Surreal, Vibrant etc., which is different from how the subject appeared in reality, and those presets can be termed "effects". Other presets (like the one I used here), by tonemapping the subject, can make it look CLOSER to the way it did to the naked eye than would be the case with an in-camera produced .jpg file.

So the overall picture has been altered in some way. So why try to confuse me by insisting that no special effects were used and blaming it on the December sky?

As I said, no special effects were used. Tonemapping, as explained above, is not a "special effect". In-camera .jpg images (which you use) are not "the truth" as you seem to imagine, any sort of alteration from them being a "special effect". And there is no blaming - the result here is close to how the subject appeared to the eye, and far from being "dingy", if anything is slightly brighter and livelier than it appeared in reality.

Whatever you choose to call it, it is still an overall alteration to the picture. So please stop being pedantic about what words I use, when I'm sure you know very well what I mean.

You have done something to the picture that makes it look flat and dingy.

What is "the picture"? The RAW file as it came out of the camera? Without my doing anything at all to it there would be no picture.

And how, with nothing with which to compare it, do you know that it "looks" (has been rendered as) flat, dingy or anything else? How do you know that the scene, taken on an overcast December morning, wasn't at least as "flat and dingy"?

I'm sorry to be such a technical bumpkin, but I don't know what a RAW file is. When I say "picture" I'm quite obviously talking about the one that I see here, and I asked a perfectly reasonable question about what you do to give it that dingy look, for which I don't know the proper term. You now tell me it's called tonemapping.

As for your final question, I've been around long enough to know that no scene would look like that on an overcast December morning.

In what way would it look different?

I don't have the linguistic or technical ability to tell you that.