Just about everyone has been bored to death by a family who came back from a vacation and showed every single picture taken on that trip. However, that same family could have created an exciting and fascinating show by editing their pictures.

Editing is perhaps the most important photographic skill after knowing how to take a picture properly. This is because photography is often a percentage game: for every ten or twenty pictures you take, only one will be superb. That's where editing comes in.

Editing means that you spend hours poring over your pictures to select the strongest images. When you have narrowed down your images to about twenty percent of your original images, the very strongest start to jump out.

If you created a folder such as C:PhotosBest, as suggested earlier in this chapter, you can now make a subfolder of Halloween pictures such as: C:PhotosBestHalloween. Copy your strongest images from your original Halloween photos into that folder, but don't be too critical; save less impressive but still promising pictures to a separate folder.

Once you have made an initial selection, go through these selected Halloween images again and pick the best of the best. You might want to save them to a second folder called Best_of_Best or rename them so that you can work on them. As a result, you have really narrowed down your choices to the very strongest images. These best of the best pictures will be worth tweaking and spending a good deal of time on in your digital darkroom or with image-editing software to get them just right.