Photoshop: cheating or not cheating?

[alanscape]

This is  perhaps a photographic 'can of worms'! O.K., maybe it's not the right subject for this forum but here goes...
...I was jumped on recently by a friend who accused me of cheating when I removed some power lines, corrected camera distortion and did a little sharpening with the usm tool.
I do not insert the moon from another file or transform a mid-morning scene into an African sunset (but if I did isn't it the image that's important?).
Perhaps because I'm an oldish ex. (if there's such a thing) professional photog. I tend to do things in Photoshop that I'd have done
in the darkroom or studio eg: dodge and burn, paint out power lines, tip the base-board to correct verticals and doesn't the term
'Unsharp-mask' come from darkroom days?
I no longer need to spend hours with my paints and brushes painting out litter from a scene but use my experience to 'borrow' a group of appropriate pixels from another part of the shot, as a landscape painter as well as a photorapher, I've developed an 'eye' for where to borrow them from.
To me it's just digital re-touching and not 'cheating', when I paint a landscape in oils and there's a line of pylons tramping across the
glen I don't paint them in any more than I'd put tomato sauce in a single malt!

[Bob Atkins]

It depends on the purpose of your work. If you are a photojournalist then adding or removing elements from a scene is unethical, and a number of photojournalists have been fired when caught manipulating their images.

On the other hand if you're an artist using photography as your medium then almost anything goes, though there is a point at which an image ceases to be "photography" and becomes "digital illustration". Defining that point is the problem!