Photo Editing / Before & After

I’ve been thinking about starting this column for a while now, and recently realised again how important it really is to edit your photos. You might be a pro at shooting in manual, and know everything about aperture, ISO, and shutter speed.But even if you get your exposure right (or almost right) and everything’s in focus, it still helps so much to do a basic edit.
So, thinking that most of you probably won’t have Photoshop or Lightroom, I’ve downloaded Picasa, a free editing software, which you can easily get right here.
I picked a photo from this post, and seriously only did some very basic editing, adjusting brightness, colour, and sharpening.
Here’s what I got, next to each other so you can easily compare the two:

If you feel like your photos always look a bit greyish, or are just missing a bit of contrast and ‘power’, give editing a go. If you’re not so much into Picasa (I’ve only tried it once myself, so can’t say too much about it at this stage), try out some other basic editing software, and let me know how it goes.