Not the case with the OP, but this reminds me of a video I saw recently on instagram (which I rarely use). It’s one of those “Before and after” RAW file videos. It was a picture of a parrot, and the guy did so much work that it was almost indistinguishable from the original. A ton of local adjustments with exposure brushing, many gradients and exposure changes with masks, localized saturation changes, etc. At the end it looks more like a painting than something else. I guess that is an artform in itself, but when does it stop being photography?
Good question. Perhaps somewhat rhetorical, but I believe that it stops being photography when the image is deceptive to the viewer in the sense that it deviates significantly from what one expects by capturing light on a recording surface (sensor or film). That’s why black and white is obviously photography: one knows immediately what is done to achieve the effect. Obviously, there are grey areas that deserve more discussion.
Is it an art form? Not sure about that either. I think a second entity needs to be named here that goes beyond art: production-oriented sense stimuli, or that which is produced merely to provide superficial stimuli rather than to communicate anything meaningful between human beings. What AI generates almost entirely falls within that category, and a lot of photography contains a component of such a thing. It probably arises whenever one tends to produce something according to the whims of the immediate feedback mechanisms of advanced telecommunications, rather than according to the connection with one’s own soul.
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Split this out so as not to detract from the PlayRaw.
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To me, photography is documentary in nature. A real scene, real light, captured and rendered plainly. Pictures of things. That’s what makes photography unique.
The moment it becomes abstract, it becomes “art” in my mind, and the provenance in real light becomes incidental. Pictures about things don’t need to adhere to reality the same way as pictures of things. It becomes all about expression, instead of a record.
Which is to say that I keep my photography truthful, with minimal editing. But in my art, I don’t keep the same pretense of realism.
That’s not a value judgement in my mind, just two different modes of expression in the same medium.
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I’m not sure there’s a hard line I can point to. Image manipulation has been a thing since the dawn of photography so you can’t really say whatever comes out of the camera is the only authentic way. The film you choose, the JPEG preset you choose, that’s a choice to manipulate the image.
But of course you can take it too far. IMO landscapes with the moon where it’s a composite made to make the moon bigger and more dramatic is maybe not purely photography. But then should any compositing like focus or exposure stacking be considered not purely photography? I don’t think so.
My intuition says it has something to do with honesty. The moon example is creating an image that is dishonest to what was actually there (from the pure perspective of photography being something based in reality). Exposure and focus stacking are overcoming limits of the sensor and lens physics, but it’s not really changing the core of what the photographer saw.
Things like sky replacement seem obviously outside the bounds of photography. Generative object replacement too, but even then there’s a gray area. Is removing a little piece of trash the same as removing people and filling in the area? Is stuff like spot removal where you’re cloning another part of the image the same?
Infrared photography is tricky. It’s certainly not what the photographer saw, but it is what the filter/lens/sensor saw. But the interpretation of it and how the photographer adjusts the colors is very open ended, there’s no right or wrong there, so there’s no real objective reality to base it on. I don’t think my IR photos are dishonest, but I don’t know how to square it against that concept either.
So basically, I have no idea, but I think I can usually tell when something goes too far (for me).
I do agree with Jason’s sentiment in the OP quoted post. Sometimes you just have to get a better shot from the camera rather than endlessly polishing it into something that isn’t really there.
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The idea if images being of something or about something is certainly an interesting notion to ponder on…
I view photography as a merely a process of detecting and recording photons. Kind of like how science is a process and not a product. So an image stops being photographic only when it is no longer sufficiently sourced from the photographic process. Which is a Sorites problem (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/, so I am willing to allow a great deal of “deviation”. Truth and reality discussions I will leave to kinder people than I am.
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Photography: The art of manipulating light to capture a three-dimensional moving world as a two-dimensional still image.
That is how I introduce and define photography to students when I start teaching a new photography class.
I don’t see photography as a scientific record. In the days of film our first manipulation was choice of film stock to use. Then shutter speed to introduce or prevent blur. Aperture for depth of field and other aesthetic qualities. A long or short focal length for DoF and to compress or exaggerate perspective. Then of course the editing process opens up a whole gamut of options for further manipulation.
The lines for me are blurry as to when an image is still a photograph and when it has become a digitally generated image. I am too old to worry too much about such trivial matters. What is important to me is that a person gets pleasure in picking up a camera and capturing their interpretation of the world. An added bonus if they continue the creative process and edit the image to achieve their desired endpoint.
But returning to the sentiment of the original post, sometimes excessive editing indicates that you need to improve your camera skills rather than relying on excessive editing of images or AI generated edits. Also for me a photograph is no longer a real photograph when computers are used to add objects into the scene. This becomes digital art. But then why am I willing to accept the removal of a distracting object and not feel the same way? 
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Fundamentally art is expression that gives order. I think that underlies the medium and certainly the style / genre. There’s nothing inherently preventing completely literal expression from being art. Photo realism in painting is one example.
That’s why I always get a little amused (possibly bemused) when photographers – particularly on YouTube – seem to equate abstraction with art… or more accurately the lack of abstraction with “non-art”.
(not a shot at you @bastibe, just an observation)
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The question is posed as one of principle, which I can relate to, but for my own purposes the amount of editing is dictated by practical concerns.
Specifically, I am too lazy to invest a lot in editing.
I enjoy taking images. I subscribe to the view that the photographer creates the image by choosing the angle, the field of view, the moment, etc. If this does not get me 90% to the end result, I usually delete the image, because I already spend too much time in front of computers, for me that part is not enjoyable.
So practically I just dial in exposure (maybe one or two extra instances with masks), adjust the colors, and apply an AgX preset.
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Hi Phil. You taught me that sharpness in a photographic image can be a distraction and that sometimes softness in landscapes look more artistic because they replicate the look of a Constable landscape painting. I still love that print you sent me
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Thanks! I wish it looked like it did on screen, luminous and all. But that’s nature of the medium(s), screen vs. print.
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I am with @Terry. In the overall scheme of things, it doesn’t matter.
Personally, I lean to trying to make a photograph look as realistic as possible. But I can appreciate when others take wildly artistic approaches. And everything in between.
I’ll do me and you do you. It’s all good.
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Chiara Talia recently posted a video on a related topic of the spectrum of possible edits, which contains a similar line of thought:
Even though the edits were demonstrated in Luminar Neo, which is proprietary software and off-topic in this forum, the ideas behind them are what counts for the video’s message, and these ideas are editor-independent.
That said, all three edits demonstrated in the video still count as photos to me.
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I follow her on instagram, I think someone recommended her here. She has pretty good content. Maybe why I started seeing all these “photo influencers” out of the sudden.
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Even her artistic or AI Enhanced edits were not even close to what I saw/was describing, they were all pretty okay and what you would expect from the scene.
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That said, the one where AI is used heavily looks like someone cut out a puffin from a magazine an glued it to a background.
(I finally understood what people mean by 3d pop! 
)
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In my view, there is no original. There is just sensor data. Strictly speaking, photography for me stops at capturing light data as electron counts from the sensor, or on film. The rest is postprocessing, whether the camera does it for you, or you do it in darktable.
What there is, is intent and taste expressed within the context of that intent. We have powerful tools, and with a lot of power comes a lot of responsibility. Those who can constrain themselves enough to develop good taste succeed in this hobby. Others produce interesting results of sliding knobs around.
Isn’t that because no feathering was used?
Did you? My understanding of 3D pop online lore is that the cutout effect is the opposite of it, or at the very least a different thing 
I should’ve written “original scene”, maybe that would’ve been more clear. And of course while everyone sees scenes differently, light doesn’t magically shine on different parts of an object independently of who’s looking at it, assuming all observers are in the same spot.
In that case the answer would be simple: any time an image departs from some normalized (or idealized) perception of the photographed scene given the same light.
Achieving that was physically impossible in the film era and I doubt we are at a point where we can achieve that now. We also probably agree that such a tight restriction would be undesirable.
So we can add that a picture stops being photography once the departure from our perception crosses an arbitrary limit, but then, that’s your original question, where is the limit? So we just went in a circle.
Hitting circular reasoning, I actually go back to my previous comment: the better question is where are the limits of good taste.
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