Editing Software

Your camera can only do so much of the job. You can make a huge amount of difference to the finished image with the right editing software. This picture to the right shows what even a minimum amount of editing can do to a photograph. Obviously you want to get the picture as "right" as you can inside the camera, but editing can work some miracles on top of that - especially if your lighting isn't perfect (which it is unlikely to be outside of the studio).

It is worth noting that you can do so much more with your editing software if you shoot in your camera's RAW format rather than straight to jpeg. This is because when jpeg compresses the file it loses quite a lot of the information in the image which you might want to bring out later. Always shoot RAW.

With editing you can correct and enhance so much. For example in the before and after screen capture from Lightroom to the right:

White balance is corrected.
The detail hidden by the shadows is now visible.
The picture has so much more "punch".

In our opinion if you are at all serious about photography you will be wanting some kind of editing software. Below we discuss some options.

We recmmend that you start with Adobe Lightroom, which will cover all basic, and many advanced editing needs. If you're getting into more complex editing you'll want to move onto using adobe photoshop in addition. there are really the "go to" editing programs. There is also open source software such as "the Gimp", which you might like to try.