I agree that the hand wrapping edit was poor taste and to me it's pure turd polish especially considering faking the film look.
I'm not sure if it's my low brow/non academic taste but the hand wrapping one, bland photo even edited IMO.
The type of edit before that (clouds) I've done myself, especially when I used to have a point and shoot and used full auto.
I try to do everything in camera now, usually on aperture control for the most part tweaking the white balance and ISO as I'm shooting.
I can't lie though, I usually fine tune 70 -80% of my shots in camera raw, most get something like fill light/blacks or a temp. adjustment.
I never really change the dimensions through cropping but occasionally cut paste and transform (stretch) the image but keep the original dimensions.