I believe as a photographer you should know all the tools that are available in the bag that is photography.  So that's how to use a camera, how to use various things like flashes, lenses and other camera toys and developing software such as Photoshop.  So synonymous with photography and the alteration of images has Photoshop become it now has an entry in the Oxford English dictionary as follows.

Photoshop

In fairness all 'professional' pictures coming out of a camera need to be Photoshopped in some way or another.  A bit of a crop, some simple adjustment.  

You can think of the pictures that come from the camera as negatives that need to be processed in some why prior to developing or printing in the same way a wet dark room would have done.

But what if you want to do something more and where do you draw the line ..

There are so many things to do to a picture these days, make you thin, remove birth marks etc etc.  My general stance is I'll trim you a little bit, I'll remove spots because they aren't normally there and I have been known to airbrush a wrinkle or two away.

After that though the fun can start and photoshop allows the production of digital art.  I call these creatives and I have a full gallery of them here and it's where the crazy bits of my mind come out to play ... sometimes I take the pictures with the creative in mind and sometimes something will just scream out at me to do something with it ... 

If you read my recent post about family portraits you'll know I managed to get all the members of my family in front of the lens ( including myself ) for the first time in a long time a while ago ... anyway I have the fine art images I was after but I also thought about a Family tree, once I looked at my pictures, I had an idea to make a graphical image rather than cut square pictures with borders.

Anyway this is what I ended up with after few hours I think you'll agree it's a bit different from the normal family portrait ...

Family Tree