When it comes to creating photographs, taking the actual picture is only half the battle. This has always been true, even long before the days of Adobe Photoshop. Editing with Photoshop just makes the process a lot easier. The photographs of Ansel Adams made nearly a century ago look nothing like the image captured on the negative. The final prints Adams made required painstaking hours in the darkroom, dodging and burning and tweaking contrast before the photograph you see hanging on the wall was ready for display.

Editing with Photoshop

Even photographers that didn’t manipulate their images as much as Ansel Adams still had to spend countless hours selecting, editing, cropping and tweaking their photographs before they were ready for the world to see. To think that manipulating photographs is a modern phenomena enabled by Photoshop and digital cameras is a fallacy. Photoshop has just opened the doors for quicker and easier edits as well as endless experimentation in real time. What took Ansel Adams hours now takes seconds.