I wasn’t always the editor that I am now. I have grown a lot in the last three or four years. My editing used to consist of occasional crop or turning it to black or white. I used iPhoto(now called called Photos) that came with my MacBook. There were two big reasons for this and the biggest one fear and being imitated by editing. I just didn’t know where to start to learn how to figure how to do any of the sliders. The second reason being that I was listing to a podcast where they criticized ending a photo for hours and not doing what you can in camera so yo didn’t have to spend all this time fixing it. I took that way too much to heart and decided to not to it at all. I know that it helped me in the long term to help me mast my camera. It helped me learn how to do things in camera. My love and passion as of photographer keep growing and I wanted to get a job doing it. All of the jobs I was looking at required knowing how to edit so I started to learn Adobe Lightroom. When I started learning how to edit it started to change everything about my photography. It didn’t change how I saw things but it helped me translate what I was seeing through my camera and editing. I got a job taking newborn photos in hospitals. It helped me get to know my camera more and helped with my editing even better. Covid took over the world and I got laid off from my job. I had time on my hands and I decided to make more progress on my editing. With all the time on my hands I started mastering editing and improving leaps and bounds to where I was before. I hadn’t ever used photoshop before and didn’t even know what any of the buttons did before the pandemic. Late in 2021, I started struggling with a lot of grain out of the camera and when I was exporting. There were times when I had the photo where I wanted it to be and would export it and it would have a lot of grain on it. I tried exporting it in different ways but whenever I would make it a jpeg it would have grain. I started thinking that I wasn’t as good as a photographer as I thought I was. I thought I wouldn’t be able to get any better. A friend suggested trying out a different editing system which lead to me googling other systems that professionals use. I found Capture One and decided to download a free trial. What I like about Capture One is that it’s similar enough to what I’ve used before that it is familiar but has a little bit more power than what I was using. After playing around with it and watching a couple of tutorials I decided to go with Capture One. I still need to go through more tutorials to figure out what I don’t know. It’s a powerful tool and I don’t know all of what it can do.I also started changing my camera settings to help with the grain. The combination of those two things helped with the grain and got me back on track with me feeling like I could do photography again. In last two years I started to see the power of an edit. I also could see that making sure I do what I can in camera saves time in editing but I have found that editing adds life to a photo that you can’t get without it. Editing can make or break a photo.