Digital editing

Saving the throw aways. I am comfortable with my cameras. I can look at a situation and know what I need to do to change the settings on my camera to get the effect I want. I am still not where I want to be when it comes to digital editing. I think it is because the world of digital editing is soooo big. My cameras only has so many buttons and settings and it took a bit but I learned them and now know what my gear can and can not do. I have yet to find the edge of what there is to know about editing. First off there are many good options to choose from when it comes to software. Then there is so many options with in each different software. In truthfulness there are times I would like to forgo the whole new learning curve that is before me and just take the pictures and let someone else deal with the editing. This just isn't an option now that the world has gone digital. Back In high school when I took a photography class half or more of our time was spend it the darkroom, developing negatives or using the enlarger to print pictures. (Side note. As all we shot with was black and white, many of the backgrounds were out of focus nothings. One day we had beautiful stormy sky's and I took a few pictures of the sky's. I started putting that sky in the backgrounds of my other wise boring shots by making a cut out of my subjects to allow me to do a double exposure. At first I got a lot of complements from my teacher because she didn't check what I was doing. After two weeks of pictures of everything having a dramatic sky she cought on.) Back to today. Software is the new darkroom and still needs to be part of what it means to be a photographer. I saw this car and knew if I used my super wide 10-20mm Sigma lens set to 10mm and stood very close to the car the bumper would look like fangs. The problem was the big orange van next to it. I started messing with it in photoshop trying to get rid of the van both to the side of the car and reflecting off the car. As I still have so much to learn it looked like a picture that had been poorly photoshoped. So I started trying different filter effects until I found one I liked. The lesson? Just keep trying and with time knowing how to use your software will open new worlds for you and allow you to do something with what otherwise would have been a throw away picture.