-a minor amount of brightness, colour saturation or contrast changes? -The use of garish film response or large amounts of colour to oversaturate an image (like Velvia landscapes that look pretty but fake as Hell)? -Wholesale deletion and addition of objects into the frame that were not there before? When I look at unrealistic images, sometimes they look "nice" but something about them turns me off from an imaging perspective. Its like shots of a lion taken in a zoo; Sure you can get a nice close-up, detailed unhindered by grassland growth, distance, etc, but it really doesn't represent any kind of work on the part of the imager. Its essentially staged, much as heavy image manipulation is. For a magazine ad campaign to sell a camera or a car, it might make sense, but from a purely photographic standpoint, IMO, its cheating. Because we're talking art here, I guess there are no rights or wrongs.