What is real?
Has the ease of digital manipulation made it impossible to tell if a photograph is real? What's ok, and what's fakery? Are photographs records or pretty pictures?
I often use histogram manipulation (Layers, Curves, Color Balance, etc.) but I did on film too, in a much more cumbersome manner, with Multigrade paper, and variable contrast filters, and many, many less than perfect prints. Other Photoshop techniques are analogous to darkroom manipulations: dodging, burning, cropping, tinting, saturation adjustment. unsharp masking and area masking.
(Here's a Hoover Dam panorama.)
Oh yeah, panoramas and collage! The process of taping photos together is also easier digitally than by hand. They look better too, but once again, are they real?
As long as manipulations do not alter the intent of the image, they are legitimate pictorial techniques. The process of making an image need not lie entirely within the machine that we make them with, but rather it should be a cooperation of our imagination and that machine. Be cautious when using extreme digital manipulations to make pretty pictures though - they can be mistaken for real images.
