The Complete Guide to Photo Editing

Chapter 1: What Is Photo Editing and Why People Love It

Let's start by clearing up a common misunderstanding. When people hear "photo editing," they often picture a hacker-like figure in a dark room, painstakingly cutting heads onto other bodies or making celebrities look impossibly thin. But the photo editing most people actually do is far more grounded, and frankly, more useful. It's the art of taking a photo that is okay and turning it into a photo that is great — or simply the art of fixing a photo that went wrong.

Imagine this: you took a beautiful shot of your dog running in a park, but the whole image came out a little dark and the background is cluttered with a trash can. You're not a professional, but you want to make that photo worth sharing. Photo editing is the process of opening that image in a computer program and, with a few clicks and adjustments, brightening the dog, removing the trash can, and making the colors of the grass pop. That's it. That's the hobby. And it's deeply satisfying.

Day-to-day, photo editing is a mix of a few different activities. The most common is exposure correction — fixing images that are too dark or too bright. Next is color adjustment, which means making the whites whiter, the skies bluer, or the skin tones warmer. Then there's cropping and straightening, which is as simple as it sounds: you cut away the parts of the photo you