Manual Penalty VS Algorithmic Penalty

I have one question about manual penalties vs algo penalties.

For manual penalties it's all clear, someone inspected your website and marked it as spam and you either got deindex or your rankings dropped a lot.

But with Penguin or Hummingbird penalties, how does it actually work? Is it a penalty for real or actually your links get devalued and it's like having no links? I mean, are these real penalties (meaning you get penalized for a while or until you fix something) or your links get reset to zero value and your website ranks where it should naturally rank with no links.

If I'm understanding your question correctly, an algorithmic penalty is something that you can partially recover from so no, your links do not get reset to zero.

If it's a backlink issue (penguin) then you can remove the offending links, leave those that were obtained fairly and if Google agree, you'll get the juice from these real links back once the penalty is lifted. So you won't regain your pre-penalty rankings because you've removed a lot of links but you might get some of your rankings back.

That's my take on it anyway, others may so otherwise.