These two photos are the best examples of what I'm talking about.
There's no way that someone could make a photo look like these unless you shoot directly into the sun and heavily edit them. That doesn't mean that couldn't make the original photo look better, but not like this....or I can't and I don't know anyone with that type of skill. Having said that, I took both of these photos several different ways with different lighting and the photos I took with no sun in the background don't need to be edited and many may prefer those over these.
As far as the washed out blown out stuff being faked in, I guess that's up to each pro, as the guy that shoots all the Vortex optics, Berretta (and others) photos for their marketing doesn't fake that stuff in. He just shoots into the sun and adjusts his metering.
Either way, the two photos you've posted and the two that I just posted are apples and oranges (with what I was referring to anyway). Meaning that I intended to edit the crap out of my examples above (saturate/manipulate) when I took the photo.
This photo is another example. I took it a bunch of different ways (lighting scenarios), and they all look good in there own way, but I needed an insanely blown out background that would normally look like crap (without editing) to make it look like the photo above.
Having said all of that, there's a reason I post the heavily edited versions and don't post the ones that came out perfect from the get go, as those are in a portfolio and preferred by most marketing/media companies (not the edited versions).
Hopefully I'm making some sense of what I'm trying to say.
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Also that people see way more sun haze, lens flare in print than actually happened in real life. 
