I think the author means "collage" or "painted" in this piece. As to manipulation in general, even the most pristine photo needs to go through demosaicing, lum

I think the author means "collage" or "painted" in this piece. As to manipulation in general, even the most pristine photo needs to go through demosaicing, luminance, and color balance adjustments before being shown, resulting in quite some artistic freedom. Most people don't see that, as it's usually done by the camera between the raw and "jpeg" stage. Apart from demosaicing, this is nothing new compared to the analog era though. Considering that today's cameras also do destructive operations like denoising, sharpening, and possibly tone mapping, the vast majority of photos we see are in some sense maniuplated.