Digitally manipulated photos that look like painted art (some are hard even for me to tell apart!) are a big topic of debate among artist as you can imagine. Most artists are against them as they can look pretty darn good and they feel it takes away from the authenticity of a real painting. I have played with Painter and Photo Shop and can get photos to look like a real painting pretty easily which is almost scary. People may buy a print like this thinking it was hand painted, and would not be happy to find out that it wasn't.
My personal thoughts are it's fine if it is made clear, and advertised as, digital art. I will ever do digital paintings, to sell or otherwise, beyond the bit of playing I've done to see what it was all about, but I do plan, just as Kenny has said, to take photos I've taken myself and change the backgrounds on them to enhance them, but I want those to still obviously look like a photo, not a painting. The controversey rages in the art communities though, times are a changin'.
Julie, sometimes when I've painted for hours I will think "I wish I could just take photos, it's so much faster and easier!" But then when I am taking photos and get the exposure wrong or fight lighting, etc, I will think "I wish I could just paint this darn thing" LOL.
