Why edit photos?

Cleaning photos can be a lot of work, especially when photographing a lot of pieces at once. I spent some time taking photos of 30 items over the weekend, which meant I ended up with 245 photos to filter through, crop and clean up. That's a lot of work.
Sometimes I look at the huge numbers of photos, sigh, and feel discouraged. It's a lot of work for seemingly little payoff, so why edit your photos?

Cameras have come a long way, but they still don't capture most things exactly as you see them. Colors aren't always quite right, the purple spectrum is especially hard to capture accurately. This is why post-processing has always existed. Adjustments made after the photograph is taken can make a world of difference! Don't believe me? Here's a photo straight off my camera, it's only been cropped to eliminate useless white space.

These earrings are made with beautiful, shiny red glass beads and antiqued brass wire. They were photographed against a piece of white poster board, in natural morning daylight. As you can see, the red isn't too red, the brass isn't too brassy, and the white background is definitely not white. In fact, it doesn't look anything like what I was actually looking at!

Less than a minute later, I've made a few simple changes to the photo. Using Photoshop CS5, I made the following fast tweaks:
• Auto contrast
• Auto color
• Adjust levels (increasing whiteness)
• Auto tone

That's it! Less than sixty seconds. Eight clicks of the mouse. And now it's not just closer to what the image looked like to the human eye, it's better a better product photo. When you compare the two, which looks better?
The first one isn't bad, but the second is a much higher quality photograph. That's why even basic post-processing is important for your shop.

But that's it for today - I still have 244 photos to clean up!