It seems to come in waves, but we often get questions with a sample photograph and tags like "photoshop", "post-processing", "photo-editing" and the base assumption that the photographer's primary effort was in a computer technique (possibly just choosing the right software filter — with "filter" being another often-selected tag even when there is no strong indication that a filter, software or otherwise, is essential to the photograph).
Other times, they assume that there's some magic camera setting which will Make My Photos Be Like That.
Recent examples:
- Photography editing style and secret
- Is there a name for the type of editing applied to this photo?
- How is this effect created in Photoshop?
And a few older ones:
- How were these portrait photos edited to get this look?
- Bright green Nature photography ("Could anyone tell me a photoshop or lightroom workflow to achieve this effect?")
(And so on....)
We can answer each of these with "actually, that's lighting / composition / timing / artistic vision", but that gets tedious. Half of the answers end up being about the basic lesson in photography (sorry, no magic button) — and then that doesn't necessarily help with what the asker actually wanted to learn. We can close them as unclear, but really it's fairly certain what was wanted (usually, how to actually learn to get the desired result — but sometimes, just still the magic button). Or we can edit the questions drastically — but that's a lot of work and will generally completely change them. Is there a better way? (Perhaps a custom close reason?)