Time to post this again.

[KmH]

Rendering the Print

Photography is at its core an attempt to represent the reality of light in a media that can’t faithfully reproduce it.
The range of the print is limited.
The photographer and the printmaker must make sacrifices and judgments about what should be represented in the final print. These kinds of judgments can be made by a computer, but if they are, the emotional qualities of the scene are ignored.
The result may still be called art—after all, the work of the photographer is still there.
Such an image can always be improved by a good printmaker, and even more so if that printmaker is the photographer.
Only with the human element in the rendering process can the original perception be evoked. - Karl Lang

Easy or hard
Two forces have driven photographic technology forward. First is the commercial desire to make photography simple for the masses, and to include photography as a way to document our experience simply and easily. This began in 1900 with the first Kodak Brownie and continues today with the hundreds of "point and shoot" digital cameras. The primary objective is a pleasing memory with little effort and low cost.
In stark contrast to this goal is the artist’s desire for absolute quality and the flexibility to interpret the scene as he or she envisions it. These photographers desire as much scene information as possible with absolute control over how that information is rendered. A photographic system designed to be fast, easy, and automatic does not have the quality and flexibility required to realize the vision of the artist.
Our ability to capture and render an image has advanced swiftly. Today there are thousands of ways to create a photograph: from the hand-made glass plate, 35mm film, 4x5 view cameras, a cell phone, or a digital SLR, to amazing purse-candy point and shoots. Each has vastly different capabilities, and each requires various levels of user expertise to realize a final image. - Karl Lang

And another good resource:

Calibrating The Digital Darkroom