My belief is there is a generally accepted misnomer in the photography world. That misnomer is “editing” when applied to retouching images. As far as I’m concerned, “editing” is the process of finding the best (or worse) images in a group in order to limit the total count of images for display, sale and or retouching, etcetera. A magazine Photo Editor picks the images of a photographer or photographers to display with an article, story or gallery, he doesn’t retouch the images (hopefully).
Retouching is the process of refining an image in “post” after the image was taken. Of course there are varying degrees of retouching. Correcting color to be accurate and other fine adjustments are not usually considered retouching. Modifying an image to display something that wasn’t captured in camera such as moving, adding or erasing parts of a photo always is.
I have to confess that although I love all the languages of the world, I have yet to learn any myself, including English. And that is quite true after all, I’m an American.