Want to know a secret? Lean in close. When it comes to photography, I’m so not a pro and therefore — I kinda cheat a little.

I’ve been behind an SLR camera for about 18 years now and much to my husband’s dismay (and probably my high school photography teacher if she knew what I was up to these days) … I really don’t know how to use all of the capabilities my camera has. Clearly I love to take pictures. But I’ve never made the time to really, truly focus on understanding all there is to know. Major kudos to all of you who have learned the technical side of photography.

As for me, digital editing is everything to my pictures. Sure, it takes some skill and experience to take decent pictures. I have a little skill and I have a little experience. But the shots I take almost always need to be touched up. Most photographer will tell you the same thing. They don’t share pictures with their clients that don’t go through some sort of editing.

Have a look at some before & after images:

That is the lock on the front door of the largest wooden church in the world, built in 1847 (Kerimaki, Finland).

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Gymnastics lessons. Go, Claire, go!

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Bedtime snuggles & wrestling — resulting in yesterday’s POTD.

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Flowers in front of the Helsinki, Finland temple where my parents are currently serving a mission.

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So what’s my method? Well … I used to edit all of my pictures in Adobe Photoshop. Still love Photoshop. Still use Photoshop – mostly for adding text and creating invitations & announcements and other projects. But since I’ve been organizing all of our digital pictures in iPhoto for years, I have finally converted to using iPhoto’s simple editing for the majority of my quick edits. Including every POTD for our family’s Project Life book as well as every picture I post here on my blog.

Because I know that many of you are Mac users (and every Mac has iPhoto built into the computer), I thought I’d share my go-to edits that I find myself using with just about every picture I use. If you’ve never edited in iPhoto, today is the day. Seriously — give it a try!

When you double-click on an image in iPhoto, you’ll see this at the bottom:

Click on Edit and you’ll see this:

At this point, you have all these options. Play around. I always click on Effects and Adjust. These are the 2 things that will pop up, shown now at the right side of my image:

No two photos will be edited exactly the same. So I’m not going to recommend to “bring this slider up this much” and “bring that slider down that much” or “click on Boost Color this many times”. Again, you just need to play around.

For this particular photo, I brought up the Exposure quite a bit, a little on the Sharpness, and a tiny bit on the De-Noise. You can see how far I took my sliders. I ended up not doing anything with the Effects options on this particular photo, but I love that iPhoto shows you in thumbnails what your picture would look like with any of those options. Plus, they’re variable. You can go pretty intense … not that I ever really go very intense.

These are the main features I use for quick edits:

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Going digital with our cameras years ago was huge. Remember that? Digital editing is just as huge, if you ask me. A quick edit on any picture can make a big difference. You’ll love your pictures that much more. If you haven’t dabbled in this, give it some time.

Remember: Different strokes for different folks. I’m simply sharing with you what I use and what I do. Everyone has a different system that works for them. I realize these specifics aren’t 100% applicable to PC users, but your photo-editing software likely has similar features & functions.

Also worth noting: I’m not tech support. You will probably have far better luck getting your questions answered by the real experts. Check out Apple’s iPhoto Support site or google your questions. It’s amazing how much information that’s out there.