digital - Where lays the border between correcting photo and creating a new one using PC?

There are two physical different steps on creating the photo:

1. Actual shooting (including preparing to shooting)


2. Post processing on PC (all what starts after downloading the photo to PC)

On the current technical level, there are almost no borders in the image editing using all kinds of the Image Manipulation programs. So, the difference between actually shot picture and the post processing result can be a really significant.

So my question is where finishes the image correcting and starts image creating?

Answer

It is all image creation.

Please, let me explain. When you take a photo, regardless of the medium used to record it, what you are recording is a virtual image projected by a lens onto a focal plane. The nature, intensity, and direction of the light illuminating your subject, the design of the lens and the focus and aperture settings, the amount of time the shutter is left open: all of these affect the properties of the image you record. Two identical cameras pointed at the same subject can produce incredibly different results by altering one, several, or all of those variables.

The digital age just moved the manipulation of transforming the recorded image to a print from the darkroom to the desktop. It is true that it has also expanded the possibilities of the degree to which an image may be manipulated, but perhaps not as much as some might think. What it has really done is made that manipulation much less time consuming and allowed us to do it much more efficiently. In the film era we could have shot the same scene with dozens of different types of film. Now we can take a single RAW image and retroactively apply the characteristics of each of those films. What would have taken weeks or months to meticulously combine several varying exposures into a single image of a high dynamic range scene we can now do in a matter of minutes.

From the moment we select what to leave in the frame and what to leave out, we are creating something that is different from the reality it represents. Susan Sontag once said, "...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude."

A photograph is always an expression of the photographer's vision. Sometimes it may closely resemble what others see when they look at what has been photographed. Sometimes it can be totally transformational. On rare occasions it can be both. "Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation." - Ansel Adams