I guess we all do it to a certain extent, even if it means just cropping in to the subject. I'm prone to adding some subtle lighting effects, or removing belmishes (either those on the photo or just unwanted objects that are in the frame). Tonight was slightly different.
The best of the batch was a good close-up of the fox, but because I'm shooting in the dark (literally), framing is a problem and this one came out on a fairly heavy slant.
What I ended up doing was cropping in slightly and then swivelling the image to level out the ground. After all, the ground was level, it was just the camera that wasn't. That left a number of other problems. There were slight 'edit' lines on the image which I cloned out. More problematic was that the swivel had left part of the step (on the bottom left) missing (the crop had gone across horizontally so the last 20% of the step was actually just black background. So the step needed extending. Again, the clone brush came to the rescue, with a hard edge to avoid any blurring. I also tidied up some doubling of the flowers that had occured through the combination of swivelling and cropping. The last tweak was to remove the sunflower heads that are just visible to the right of the fox's rear flank.
Here's the finished image:
