My opinion on altering pictures is fairly simple. As long as you're only doing things that the camera could have done, it's fine by me. If you're removing things from the picture that don't contribute anything to the image (i.e. coke bottle on the ground that you didn't see when you took the photo), it's fine by me. If you're adding something that ultimately *is* the entire value of the picture, for example a lightning bolt from another time and place, then it's not fine by me and it's cheating and makes the picture valueless.

All digital pictures require a modicum of touching up, whether it's noise removal, correction of lens distortion or basic adjustment of brightness/contrast/saturation. Even cropping an image is just another method of digital alteration. In most cases the camera itself makes more changes to the image before it saves it to the memory card than you make while post processing the picture anyway.

Great catch!

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*photographersfanclub

Thank you.