Some believe you are changing it from a photograph to a false view of reality. But really, the tools just got better. A great example comparing a standard analog print against a digitally enhanced print is shown on page 65. In this article, Galen describes his view on the philosophy behind digital image processing that is very close to mine. While you can do many amazing and fun things with Photoshop besides this, such as composites and overlays, warping, etc.
Faithful recreation is the goal.
Additionally, the color space transforms used by the PhotoCD film scanners can extract incredibly accurate data from the film, by taking advantage of deep knowledge of the film's response characteristics to light. Effectively, and inverse transform is applied to the data, to faithfully reconstruct as best as possible the original scene. The result is that the digital scan is actually a much more accurate representation of the image then every possible with analog methods. The result is - you can get significantly better images by working with the digital data than were ever possible in the analog darkroom days. These tips are directed at high resolution images such as those created by scanning film.