The importance of editing

I thought for my first blog post that I'd touch on the importance of editing your pictures - a beautiful photograph will be beautiful no matter what, but when you edit a photo, you can take it from ordinary to extraodinary!

There are also cases where you have no choice but to shoot, for instance, at a high ISO - this has you running the risk of your pictures having noise, or looking pixellated. When a picture like this is printed, the quality is sub par - however, there are ways to correct this!

Depending on how you shoot your photos (RAW or JPEG) you'll be able to edit your photo's differently. I shoot in RAW and use Adobe Lightroom as my editing console. I find that it has the ease of use I'm looking for, with the option to export to Photoshop and complete further editing, then return to Lightroom for developing of the photo. 

On the weekend, it was my daughter's baptism. unfortunatly the lighting in the church wasn't ideal, so the ISO on my camera needed to be set to 1600 - the highest I like to shoot is 800, because at 1600 I always notice noise. The beauty of editing your photos is that you can take the noise and 'smooth' it out. Alternatively, you can leave your ISO at 800 on the camera and produce an underexposed photo, and then correct the exposure when editing.
Here's an example of noise correction on a photo; the left half is the original and the right is the edited version:

You'll see (even on the thumbnail) that the skin is significantly smoother, the flyaways on the hair appear less noticeable and the picture even appears slightly lighter! So with just a touch of editing, the picture is t from "I'd post it online" to "I'd print and keep it".