> It's like saying "many people don't expect books to be proof-read, when most are".
It's not. Books are written by humans. You expect them to contain fiction or opinion. Pictures are taken by mechanical equipment with no agenda. "The camera never lies" etc. Obviously you can also stage a photograph unrepresentative of reality using techniques other than Photoshop, but the general expectation is that what you see in a photograph is what you would have seen with your own eyes if you had been there at the time.
But people also blame Photoshop when the problem is endemic. Only people with certain body types are hired in Hollywood. Then they have professional makeup artists and hair stylists make them up like a plastic doll, and then the pictures are photoshopped.
I suspect a big part of the reason the criticism is rarely taken seriously is that the proposed alternative of "normal" people is so obviously the wrong one. The average American is overweight and doesn't get enough exercise. People aren't going to want to look at that or be inspired to look like that, nor should they be. But the concept that the represented ideal physical appearance should resemble real athletes rather than stick figures or couch potatoes doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone.
There are a great many choices made between photons striking the sensor and photons from your computer screen striking your eyes. In the absence of Photoshop, they're made by an engineering team's best guess at a general procedure for transforming the raw electrical data into a photorealistic scene, but these algorithms do not have a special claim on the truth and the parameters they choose are not necessarily "right." In some situations (such as rooms with unusual color-temperature light sources) they are unambiguously wrong.
Professionals use Photoshop when they disagree with the choices made by the on-camera chip, which is almost all of the time. Working from RAW, you can start fresh from something closer to raw sensor data and move the sliders for yourself. But those sliders have to be somewhere, effectively, and taking manual control of them (or overriding them with further transformations) doesn't make a photo less real. It's much more like copy-editing.
Most images you see are Photoshopped, but most of the editing (and all of the editing in journalism) is done with the intention of making the photo a more accurate representation of what the photographer saw.
Where you get people editing photos to make them more than what was really there is in art. Ansel Adams made choices in the darkroom motivated by aesthetics rather than accuracy, and he was damn good at it. I'm sure most glamour photographers would tell you they're engaged in a similar kind of artistry.
I'm less interested in fashion magazines creating unrealistic representations of the human form than why people believe these are credible ideals to aspire to, rather than mildly amusing curiosities.
The Photoshop manipulation has very little distortion — the camera engineer could not have produced these images, and the intention is entirely to make the image /less/ like what the photographer saw.
(It isn't just women. Yesterday's junk catalogue is illustrated with perfect-looking children and teenagers, sometimes with perfect-looking parents.)
[Edited links, I pasted them the wrong way around.]
There a different kinds of photography. And in any case, the reality is somehow subjective, even our color perception differs, so how can you say which version is "true".
Anyway, in many cases photographer's task is to show the others something the way he sees it, not necessarily the way it "is".
My other point is, that some photoshopping is just a routine of preparing the product, some digital hygiene if you want.
