Of course not. Obviously I use midtones.



Think of a bell curve. The x axis is the value, the y axis is a number. Each spot on the curve represents how many pixels have a certain value, and the area beneath the curve represents the total number of pixels in my image. Out of one million pixels, two might be hard black. That would be represented by a point on the far left of the curve. Four might be hard white; they'd be at the far right. 60,000 might be slightly darker than gray; they would fall on a point somewhere int the middle. Furthermore, you want your curve to be smooth--every value between the endpoints should appear in your picture at least once. A hole in the curve represents one value that you never used, that you probably could have used to add some subtlety or contrast that would have made your picture better.



Obviously, the vast majority of your pixels will fall somewhere in the middle of the curve. Nobody is going to notice the two out of a million pixels that are hard black; nobody is going to notice if they AREN'T there, either. And obviously I'm not going to hunt through all of my pictures pixel by pixel to make sure I ALWAYS have at least one 000000 and at least one ffffff. But if you decide, on principle, to never use values on the far ends of the curve, you're unnecessarily limiting yourself. Soon you become afraid to use values less than brightness level 10, or more than brightness level 90, or some other arbitrary numbers, just because you're worried that they're "too dark" or "too bright". And the edges of your curve start creeping inwards until all your pictures have very little contrast at all.



Maybe what I'm saying won't make a lot of sense to a lot of people. But I'm kind of a math-oriented guy. I think of making digital art as the simple act of manipulating values across a color space. And if I'm not considering all areas of the color space as possibilities to include in my pictures, I'm doing something wrong.