Photo-Retouching

As our keyword search was photo retouching, I decided to find one of the more extreme examples as posted above. Now, I'm sure that no magazines do this much extreme retouching, but it can happen.
Magazines retouch photos everyday for their advertising pages and interviews to give celebrities or models the look and idea that they are "perfect". Perfect skin, eyes, teeth, complexion. If you can think of things "wrong" with you, then the editors for retouching can certain help you out.
And it's right at our fingertips.
When I searched photo retouching, I found a lot of tutorials on how to retouch photos from your very own computer.

Photoshop Makes Retouching Pictures Easy
Anyone have Photoshop? I know I have the "free" Photoshop package on my computer, which limits my editing possibilities, but hey, I can make my hair go from frizzie to "frizz-free". If anyone has never experienced using Photoshop, it is a downloadable editing tool that gives you those capabilities of adding extra elements or taking away unwanted elements (like that unflattering zit you got right before Prom night).

Wait...You Didn't Look Like That on Your Facebook Picture
Photo retouching has made it easy for a lot of people to go from looking like they just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, to making it look like they're models.

Plain out and simple, photo retouching could be very misleading. Especially for people who always retouch their photos and post that as their social networking profile pics.

Anyone seen a photo of a celebrity before it was retouched?

Say hello to the camera, Brittney Murphy!

Art
It is very artistic and more jobs are being created. Which can't make photo retouching all bad, I think though that because it's exposed so widely to Gen Y, that there are going to be a lot of people out there who consider themselves artists to an extent because of it.
My friend and I have messed with making pictures look better, but sometimes retouching a photo is just a bad idea. Some people just shouldn't tamper with pictures.

Overall
Photo retouching can benefit in the number of jobs and even make a person feel better about themselves, but we can't really run from who we really are.
So I think GenY has to take that into consideration.

For now, here's an interesting YouTube video that shows photo retouching.