The article presents and excellent and very detailed case for how the photos are doctored all over the place. It's obvious and easy to see once pointed out. I can't at all imagine how it's so hard to believe.
This combined with a bunch of other odd details makes her case very suspicious. Given how much her original narrative implied fairly pure nature photography and NOT artistic composite creations, what this photographer did was dishonest in a very straightforward sense. The dishonesty becomes all the more obvious when you realize that until she was called out by a detailed analysis, she freely let sites for such entities as Saatchi Art, the U.S Embassy in Nepal, Animal Planet and the Times of London, share, claim and think that her photos were essentially nature shots with modest editing and no more. Not a peep, and she even made sales.
It was only after this individual was called out by a very specific media analysis that suddenly "News and media from around the world stole my images and published them with their own meaning. They did not ask me if they were edited. They interpreted them in their own way and spread them around the world."
And then up go the DMCA claims against the same sites that had previously shared her photos approvingly withuot being asked to take them down then (especially petapixel)
She seemed to have no problem with any of that as long as her original blog post and all it strongly implied were believed.