Firstly, there seems to be a recent trend where people are proudly announcing "I don't edit my photos". Well you damn well should!

Remember here that editing and photoshopping are the same thing. People have taken on board the term photoshopping to mean digitally editing a photo. Not just editing it in the software package called Photoshop.

Editing of photos is not something that suddenly happened 20 years ago when the advent of the computer and photo editing packages. Photos have been edited in the darkroom since the first ever photo was taken in the 1820's. Some of the world's best photographers did amazing things in their darkrooms, including Ansell Adams, Henri Cartier Bresson and more. They edited their photos! However sudddenly in the last 20 years we see a new generation who declare "I don't edit my photos". News Flash, until your photos presented on AP or elsewhere are as good as the above named masters, you damn well should!

Now back to the OP's question about portraiture. Everyone should (consider the above paragraphs), but how much editing is up to you and/or your client. You would have to have a range of editing techniques available to you, cause the editing done for a friend's baby shoot will be different to that needed for the cover of Vogue, but edit you must.

The trick is having the editing skills in the first place and then knowing when and how to apply them to suit the particular shoot you are working on.

So to the New Age purists, you go ahead and live in your belief that your photos do not need editing, and thus that your technique, camera, lens and sensor can somehow be perfect and not improved on and bypass nearly 200 years of experience, but if you want to make the most out of the results from your photos, learn how to edit!