gdanmitchell
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Posing the question as one about whether post-processing is ok or not is kind of naive. What the camera records is not objective reality anyway, and photographers have always made subjective editorial decisions about how to present their way of seeing subjects — choice of lens, use of filters, composition and framing, focal length, camera movements, black and white (!), what kinds of paper to print on, how to manipulate the film and print development process, dodging and burning, unsharp masks, cropping, and on and on and on.
And why do some think that the goal of a photograph is to present an (impossible) fully objective image of the subject? That reduces photography to being a mere recording process — and it is clearly much more than that.
Calls to respect the traditions of photography here make no sense either, since the tradition is to manipulate, often like crazy.
I was at the "Ansel Adams in Our Time" exhibit at the De Young in San Francisco yesterday, and there were numerous examples of Adams' extensive use of "manipulation" in his photographs. There was a lovely print of the iconic "Moonrise" photograph, with its radically burned down and dramatic black sky, the dodged distant clouds above the mountains, and the combination of dodging and burning in the foreground to focus our attention on certain elements.
There was also a print of the Mt. Whitney sunrise photo, in which the mountain floats above a dark middle ground band of hills, with a horse caught in a fortuitous beam of light that illuminates a meadow. In this version of the print, the middle hills were burned down to nearly complete black... obscuring the presence of the large letters, "LP" (for "Lone Pine") placed on the hillside by the local high school.
Adams "eliminated"/"removed" something unwanted from both photographs. He removed clouds from the black sky in Moonrise, and he removed those offending letters from the hill in Whitney.
As always, when someone proposes a blanket objection to "manipulation," I suggest that they look at the beautiful and imaginative work of Jerry Uelsmann, done in the darkroom with black and white film.
On one level, there are no rules. You can use any tools that you think are appropriate for achieving your photographic vision. But that's just a question of tools.
The remaining question is probably more important and more interesting: how do you apply these tools? I can think if situations where the use of a particular technique seems to should "fake" to me, but at the same time the use of the same technique in a different context seems fine and even brilliant.
You'll never get a single, simple, all-encompassing rule about this. It ends up being quite subjective and dependent on circumstances and objectives.
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We know how to use both. 
