How important is photo image editing in your work?

 I do not consider a picture finished until it has been "finished" (remember that processing used to refer to photofinishing, literally finishing the photo). I have been trained in the use of the "wet" darkroom, primarily in black and white. As many steps as there were between the exposure and the print, the print was always the objective, and always the best print. "Taking a picture" was a highly procedural act.

Long before I got my first digital camera I was gifted a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements, the 2.0 iteration released in 2002. Elements is sometimes called “Photoshop Lite” because it was intended to encompass many of the most commonly used elements (pun fully intended) of full Photoshop. As an old wet darkroom guy I was utterly entranced. I was still shooting film, and honestly very little of it, but it was the time when the corner drugstore one-hour finishing folks were offering a CD of the digitized negatives or slides. I started paying the premium to get the discs so I could play with the pictures on a computer.

I often use this pair of before-and-after pictures to illustrate why I was instantly bazoogas (special made up word  for post-processing, digital editing, whatever ya wanna call it, pretty much straight from the get-go. The shot below, from a digitized CD, was made in 2006 with a Canon T90. It was the last shot on a roll of slides, Fuji I think, but I was out of reloads so I had to make it count. But as the train left the tunnel at 40 mph there were two guys also shooting that got in my frame, plus I'd pulled the camera down to the right… Yeah, lotsa stuff not up to snuff.

Even so, there are still lots of things wrong, such as artifacts in the sky, haloing at the skyline, and so forth, but below you can see some of the things I did to improve the original with Elements 2.0.

• Corrected the tilt and cropped away the film end on the right.
• Removed the two guys as seamlessly as possible with the clone stamp (that to me was nothing short of miraculous).
• Opened the detail in the undercarriage with the dodging tool (also miraculous, especially since there seemed no compromise in quality).
• Overall brightened and opened shadows.
• Carefully cloned out the telephone pole and wires.
• Spotted down all the dust in the sky.

This was a very early effort but I still feel it considerably improved the picture.

In 2007 I got my first direct-to-digital camera, a tiny Nikon L-12 P&S. It only delivered already compressed jpegs but I thought they were incredible. Again, as an old wet darkroom guy, I never showed or posted any picture that had not been tweaked to at least open the shadow. I learned to always keep an untouched copy of the original jpeg so I could return to it as my skills advanced. I quickly discovered that jpegs were prone to highlight blocking but there would always be more detail in the shadow than was immediately apparent so I got into the habit of exposing for the brightest highlight, then “developing” for the shadow. There often would be artifacting and noise, but I was on a journey which I now know will not actually end until for whatever reason I am not longer able to make pictures. For many years now I shoot only raw in much more sophisticated cameras, but I still never show a picture that has not been processed, nowadays mostly in Lightroom CC Classic and full Photoshop when encountering things Lightroom can't do, or doesn't do as well.