New College Lane, Oxford

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?