I knew that they retouched pictures and such quite a bit, and sometimes it is very obvious on some magazine covers and such... sometimes they just make the ladies look like dolls or something extremely rubber-y.

Out of those you posted, Xander, the Cosmopolitan cover was the most shocking. The final cover didn't even look like the girl they took a picture of in the first place.
In the second link some of the cases were not that extreme, though. Especially Halle Berry and Beyonce had not been retouched that much, but what I thought was interesting was the fact that some of the before pictures actually looked better than the after ones. I noticed the ones of Alicia Keys in particular - she just looked fake in the after shots and pretty unrecognizable in my opinion.

It was nice to see that celebrities are more human and actually have some flaws. However, they are still basically attractive people.