I remember when I was first starting out in photography. I never edited my photos and took pride in that. I'm not saying there's anything wrong not editing your pictures. I'm just saying why you should give it a go!
Like I was telling you, when I first started out I never edited anything. To be perfectly honest with me a lot of that was to do with just purely being lazy. I spent a lot of time taking the shot making it as nice as I could when I was at the location. Then I'm thinking well, that should be enough. Right?
Well, one day one of my friends recommended I use Lightroom to enhance my photos. I turned it down keeping to my no editing needed philosophy. Eventually a lot of people started saying I should try it out. So from pure peer pressure I ended up downloading the software and began my editing journey.
I want to be clear about when I say editing I mean enhancing your photos using shadows, highlight, colours etc. Not making a composite. A lot of people confuse the two. The picture below is an example of a composite. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with compositing either. I've done some myself. Just wanted to make the distinction so you know what I am talking about.
A photo enhancement (the editing I'm talking about) is not taking or adding anything to the picture like for example the moon!
You can see in the image above, the before image and after enhancement. Like I was saying before nothing added, nothing taken away.
Editing your pictures, can give a style, consistency in your work. To the point when it becomes so refined people will look at a photo and be able to tell that it's yours. This is one of the keys to standing out in this fiercely competitive industry.
I used to work on a cruise ship as a photographer. I remember a woman came and asked us if we could do some training with her. So I agreed to do the training. She let me look at her portfolio and then asked what she could do to improve. When I suggested editing her photos which she had never done before she was apprehensive. Like I said before I had the mindset of being proud of not editing my shots and she was the same. I convinced her to edit one of her shots and see what she thought. She agreed. Instantly she was mind blown! She came to get more teaching on just editing- forget the photography for the rest of the cruise. It opened up a whole new dimension of photography for her. That's what I plan on doing for you reading this!
So give it a go, try it out. I'd always recommend lightroom and photoshop- for me these are the best softwares and well worth the money!
I have tutorials on lightroom you can check out here!
If you really want to get good at editing quickly check this out here!