Should watch sellers use unedited photos of their movements?

Unedited is the only way I will trust a listing. A skeleton watch is basically the movement, so if the seller is smoothing out the photos, you have no idea what the anglage or perlage actually looks like in person.

Basic cropping and white balance correction seem fine. Heavy sharpening or dust removal is where I draw the line. Those are the two things that hide real condition.

I have bought three skeleton pieces secondhand and two of them looked noticeably different from the listing photos. Not damaged, just less crisp than the edited images suggested. Now I ask for a short video in natural light before I commit. If the seller refuses, I walk.

Honestly I think a lot of sellers do not even realize they are misrepresenting the watch. Phone cameras apply their own processing, and cheap light tents flatten everythin out. Some of it is ignorance rather than intent.

The light tent thing is real.I sold a skeleton watch last year and my first photos made the movement look plasticky because of how the light hit the bridges. I ended up using window light and no filters. It looked less impressive but it was accurate, and the buyer messaged me after receiving it to say it matched the photos exactly

Fine scratches on the underside of a crystal or on polished bevels almost never show up in edited photos. That is exactly the kind of thing I want to see before I pay.

Photos of the movement should also include the caseback removed, not just through the display back. Reflections off the crystal hide too much ngl.

It cuts both ways. Unedited photos in bad light can make a perfectly good movement look dull or even scratched. Sellers have an incentive to pre sent the watch well, and buyers have an incentive to demand perfect honesty. The ones who split the difference by providing both styled and raw photos get my business.

Both styled and raw. That would solve most of this.

The bigger problem is that platform compression destroys fine deail anyway. Even an unedited photo gets mangled by the time it is uploaded. I have started asking sellers to send the original file directly, and most of them are happy to.

One more thing worth mentioning. Some sellers photograph movements with the rotor removed to show the full bridge layout. That is technically an uneddited photo but it still is not how the watch looks when you wear it. Context matters as much as editing.