Almost every professional photographer uses filters, but their use in most cases is a subtle attempt to make the film more accurately record what they see. Obtaining saturated, striking colors is almost always better achieved by finding colorful subjects bathed in beautiful light than attempting to enliven the scene with filters. The subtle craft of filterography is a way to minutely perfect an already great photograph. Filtration should almost always be a minor player, rarely the star. Wahibah sands overtake ruins in the Sultanate of Oman on the Arabian Peninsula.
Filters here help to coax blue hues out of the dust-white skies.
Some photographers claim to use no filters at all, and I followed this philosophy for many years because of its simplicity and purity. Although I find their efforts interesting, the results are often too otherworldly for my taste. Along the middle of the road are photographers like me who use filters but don't want to let the devices steal the show. A look at the photo notes from recent David Muench books shows filtration used on nearly every image. My hero, Eliot Porter, the inventor of color nature photography, once listed the dozens of filters he used to make his historic photographs of Glen Canyon before Lake Powell.