I just want to raise again the issue of oversaturated chips as a non-trivial issue when it involves transactions.
My position has been that how one “processes” chip photos is a personal preference when posting pr0n. But it ceases to be a mere personal preference if a sale/trade/auction contains photos which significantly distort the actual appearance of the chips.
I’m really not trying to pick on anyone, and am going to leave names out of it. That said, here is a recent example of two different users posting the same chips in a sales thread:
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The difference above cannot be explained just by lighting or operator error. One could easily mistake the base and spot colors of this chip if one relied only on the second image.
The first photo appears to be unfiltered, or maybe lightly bumped up. The second photo appears to have been massively oversaturated, unless the user’s camera is really bad or some extreme LED lighting was used. (I left out the chip at right, which in the sale thread appeared to be black, but a commenter pointed out is in fact brown. That suggests to me that the image’s contrast was bumped up in addition to saturation.)
Now, again... It is understandable that not everyone is a professional photographer, or has studied color theory. People take bad photos all the time without any intent to exaggerate or mislead. Individuals also have different monitor settings, and even different eyesight. So the same pic can look different to you and me. There is even sometimes slight differences in the same chips depending on how they’ve been cleaned (or not), oiled (or not), etc.
All that said, the vast majority of amateur photos tend to be more washed out and drab than reality, not more saturated and contrast-y.
As for non-sale photos... Per above, of course people are free to represent their chips however they like. Go nuts with the filters if you must. The problem comes when researching chips to collect. When saturation and contrast are all over the map, it becomes necessary to collect multiple images of the same chip to get a sense of how it is actually going to appear in person. In some cases it becomes necessary to ask specifically about the base color and have a sample set on hand to see what it really looks like.
(P.S. There are even sometimes variations in samples sets, so of course this is always going to be an inexact science. This chipper just likes to reduce the number of variables and uncertainty.)