Editing your photos is a critical part of the process for both film and digital photography. One of the most popular programs for photo editing is Adobe Lightroom, which is my personal choice for editing my digital photos. Lightroom makes editing quick and easy, with its inclusion of both AI and user-created presets, and the "Auto" feature, which lets the computer decide how to edit the photo; both are useful for providing a starting point for the user to adjust and fine-tune later. Once finished, you can simply export your edited photo, and decide to keep it as a digital file or print it. The great thing about Lightroom is that you can always go back and edit the same photo differently if you want to try a different style. While one can put a significant amount of time into editing a photo, one can also produce a very good result within a few minutes. While this makes the process very efficient, it often means I go back to an image I already edited, decide that I'm not happy with it, and continue to edit it until I get a satisfactory result. 

Editing in the darkroom is a much more time-consuming and engaging experience than using a program like Lightroom. Firstly, you aren't given a live preview of how your edits will impact your image, meaning every time you adjust exposure timing, print size, enlarger aperture, contrast filter, etc. you need to make test strips to see how they will impact the final print. These test strips are just thin strips of the same paper used to create the final print, but each one can take several minutes to develop. To do this you have to submerse them in various chemical baths: developer, stop, fixer, and finally wash them in a continuously circulating water bath to rinse them. All of this means that editing one photo to a point where you are happy can take hours; a fact I learned the hard way as I spent several hours more than I planned to try to perfect my photo in the darkroom. Despite this lengthy process, I really enjoyed my experience in the darkroom, and I felt that I really got to know the intricate details of my photo through all of the trial and error. Something that I really enjoyed about this process was a technique known as dodging and burning, where you create a paper mask to cover parts of your image as you expose it, which is necessary if you want to properly expose the highlights and shadows of the photo. Another nice thing about film is that editing is tied to creating a physical print, whereas with digital, printing is a whole separate thing, and requires several iterations for a color-accurate print.

Despite how much I enjoyed the process, there are a few major downsides to the process. Firstly, the cost of everything I needed to make prints was pretty steep, with the paper I used costing over $100 for 50 sheets, and access to the darkroom costing $15 an hour. While cheaper paper is available, the resin paper I used is significantly easier to use, much faster to develop and dry, and is less prone to warping. As for the darkroom, $15 really wasn't all that bad but isn't cheap either. The big problem is convenience. From school, it is over half an hour away by subway, and nearly an hour from where I live. I was contemplating setting up my own darkroom, but the cost of all of the equipment I would have needed was significant, to say the least, and would have taken days to set up, not to mention having to make the space completely light-proof. For someone doing this on a more regular basis, this may have made more sense, but for me, going to a dedicated darkroom was a better option. Unfortunately, the number of darkrooms left in the city is extremely sparse, meaning that my options were very limited.