Yes I also agree and yes we all manipulate/optimise our work, to represent the reality as we see it, or perhaps more importantly, as we 'feel it'.
However, on the level of image manipulation that Alain now sometimes does, or that he sometimes did when he still occasionally showed his work on here, I felt had gone way too far over the top and the reason I think this happened, is because he had moved over from medium/large film format, to medium format digital. In other words, he had gone from the limited tweaking he could acceptably apply to his film scans, to the almost unlimited manipulation he could now apply to his extra large, pixel rich digital files and in my opinion, he had fallen head first into a kind of 'kid in a candy store' type of mentality, where every slider he could push, got pushed as far as it would go. In my opinion!
I really like Alain's early work and I bought most of his books on the strength of it and still enjoy watching him on the old Lula videos. But the last shots I saw from him, looked waaaaay too manipulated for my tastes.
So yes, this is a good piece from Alain and is something I believe I have read before in one of his books many years ago, but if he were to now add an updated chapter to this work, I think it should be a warning, that yes we should all edit our files and be happy to openly admit that we do so, but that we also try to do it in an acceptably limited way, that at least stays within the bounds adjacent to reality. And in my opinion, for all the good work Alain once did and all the brilliant text he once wrote, he was also willing to take several giant leaps beyond these acceptable bounds adjacent to realty, as evidenced in this
image for instance.
But as I say, this is my humble opinion only and of course yours may differ..
Dave