I spent much of my day Sunday going back and forth with a client about a hairline. It's unfortunate that we don't always look like the picture in our minds of someone with great hair, great teeth and great skin. In this case it was mostly the first category.
In photojournalism we're taught that pictures tell stories and speak the truth. You might get away with a crop here and a color-correction there, but to push around pixels in something like Photoshop was like making up a quote or fudging a few facts.
Portraiture is a different story, since you're not trying to find some objective reality through your lens but an artistic truth. Retouching helps a photographer reach that truth when posing and lighting cannot. With enough effort the banal can become beautiful and the real, surreal.
Unfortunately Photoshop can easily go too far. You see it every time you pass a magazine rack, dozens of perfectly plastic people staring out at you, all of the little bumps and imperfections sanded away until they all look almost identical.
At Ryan Richardson Photography, I try to find a middle ground between reality and the artistic truth. To arrive at that point, I have two rules that I follow for every photo I retouch to go on the blog or in an album.