Extra Solar Planetary Imaging (Score 2)

I just had an interesting argument with a coworker. The point: while he can accept that space-based telescopes would be able to do direct imaging of extra solar planets --assuming that they can directly capture the photons traveling across all the involved light-years without interference-- he just doesnt believe that is possible to image those planets from the Earth surface, given atmospheric interference. He says that the images from Hawaii and other Earth observatories are just software interpolations that try to "guess" and "process" (his words) the anomalies in the images as planets... in other words, they are unintentionally "photoshopped" (again, his word). The basic question would be, then: how can a telescope inside our atmosphere be able to "take pictures" of something as faint as extrasolar planets?