Some people may be slightly confused on what the difference between photo editing and photo management is. Photo management has to do with keeping your photos organized in such a way that it is easy to find them. Photo editing on the other hand is about the actual editing of the photos. This involves doing simple touch up work on a photo like color manipulation, or very involved work such as completely changing the feel of a photo or adding or subtracting certain elements in the photo. You must have the best photo management system that you can have in order to make good use of good photo editing. This is because your work flow will be so much slower if you always have to find your photos before you can edit them.

Photo management software often has editing capabilities, but the main point of photo management software is to manage the photos, in other words, keep them organized and tidy. Now that we are in the digital age we often have more files and photos to keep straight, so the task of keeping them straight has become increasingly difficult. In the old days, photographers would print out many of their photographs and have them framed, or at least have them laying out somewhere to be viewed. Nowadays this doesn’t happen as much, and we are contained to the computer. It is certainly less messy this way, but it leaves us with the task of keeping track all this information. If you can never find a photo once you’ve taken it, what good was it to take the photo in the first place?

Photo editing software is just as important. Photographers try to do the best they can when they take photos, but it’s very rare to take the perfect shot right out of the camera. Almost all photographs can benefit from a little post-processing. Post-processing is the act of editing a photo after the photo shoot. Thus the name “post-processing”. Photoshop is the most used and most trusted software for photo editing and is extremely powerful. The limit to what you can do is almost unknown. You can do almost anything you want if you have enough knowledge of how the program works. This can take a lot of studying and entire college level courses are devoted to Photoshop alone.

If you want a program that is adept at both photo editing and photo management, check out my post on Adobe Lightroom. I believe it is the best photo management application available, and is also very good at photo editing. I hope this article has been helpful at understanding the difference between the two.

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