I don't think it's cheating when other people do it, but it rarely occurs to me to do serious cropping in PP. When it does, I worry about losing some image quality, especially if I'm cropping in on something really tight. I would be much more inclined to go out and try to reshoot the photo than crop it in PP - although that's not always possible. But, I think some of my anti-PP sentiments are because my tendencies are more toward a photojournalistic approach (I do work at a newspaper, after all). And preserving the integrity of the original is crucial in photojournalism. Otherwise it becomes a false image. But, really, from an artistic perspective, having PP tools like that is no different than darkroom manipulation when you think about it. It's just more advanced. But the approach is the same.
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