@joshua_ong, I think the answer is that it all depends on your genre and the purpose of your photo.
If I am shooting for a newspaper or an event, I really don’t want to be doing a lot of Photoshop work at all.
For instance, I don’t know how many of you have been watching the news lately, but let’s say I visited the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest Zone in Seattle (otherwise known as CHOP or CHAZ) and I took some photos there. I then grabbed a photo of President Trump and made it look like he visited the area. After this, I send my photo to a local newspaper and they use it for a headline.
That is obviously deceptive and wrong. The purpose of this particular genre of photography is to show a specific event that actually occurred… and if it never did, I’m lying.
I think in other genres though, we have a lot more wiggle room.
If I am shooting a wedding–say I’m capturing the first kiss at the altar—and Uncle Ernie’s head is behind the bride’s shoulder and it’s distracting from the moment and the feeling I am trying to convey with the image, I have no problems erasing his head from the image. Had I thought of it and had I time in the moment, I could have asked him to move out of the shot without a problem and he would have gladly obliged.
I think the key is that I’m not there at the wedding to be a security camera. I am there as an artist to capture a particular feeling or moment. Uncle Ernie’s head looking off into the distance isn’t adding to the feeling I am trying to capture—so out it goes.
I’d say the same goes—to some degree—to editing portraits.
While I’m editing portraits, I might sharpen and brighten the eyes up a little bit to draw the viewer’s eye into the subject’s eye, and I might do some blemish removal and skin softening. I might also leave my lens correction turned off as sometimes it can look more flattering.
I don’t think this is necessarily deceptive or wrong. I’m trying to capture a particular person, and I want them to look nice. This is the same reason why we watch our angles and our lens choice when shooting portraits. I don’t know if you’ve ever shot someone’s face with an ultra wide angle lens, but it looks really really bad (the nose looks huge, and it’s all distorted, and it looks just bad).
I would start to have some questions though if I began to dramatically sculpt that face into something it’s not: say, I raised the cheekbones and slimmed down the cheeks. Now I’m no longer capturing a person, but I’m making my own. I’d start to ask some questions at that point (like what purpose will this image serve?). If I were trying to replicate a painting like the Mona Lisa, I think we’d be okay. If I weren’t, I think I would check myself for impure motives.
If I am shooting landscapes, I don’t have many problems editing certain things out or perhaps replacing a sky. I had to shoot a lighthouse, and there was a big clump of grass in front of the light. It was distracting, it wasn’t adding to the image, so out it went. I could have walked over and clipped the grass myself as I was taking the image, but I didn’t think of it at the time.
Again, the purpose of the image is not to send the photo to the Lighthouse Society to confirm that they indeed mowed their lawn. It’s to capture a feeling and this falls well within the range of artistic expression. If I were painting a picture, I wouldn’t put the grass there. So I’ll remove it when I process my picture.
Sometimes I’ll process the clouds in an image a lot to make it look more stormy or more calm. It all depends on what I’m trying to achieve. I also think that most people these days will assume that a professional photographer’s image has been edited to some degree.
Of course, you can always go to far, and so I like to keep my images looking fairly realistic. However, I don’t think a disclaimer is necessary in most cases.
Hope this helps a little!
Logan