I think she chose her words poorly and if she's not computer savvy she may not have understood that the difference is due to software rather than digital photography. What I think she is trying to say is that in the days of film, retouching (whether by airbrush or computer image editors) was limited to fixing small problems because any large alterations would be too difficult and time consuming (read: expensive) to contemplate. The photographer had to attain what he wanted in the studio as nearly as possible. In the years since digital photography has taken over however, Adobe Photoshop has become so powerful that retouchers can now radically alter a photo to the point of making it unrecognizable, even changing the seeming source of light. This has completely changed the way some photo shoots are handled and the models can no longer guess how a photo will turn out.

She meant digital manipulation. Give her a break. She wasn’t inaccurate. She knows as much about fashion photography as any model living.