Post-processing is always an interesting topic, subject of much (and often animated!) discussion, and for those of you who don’t usually dwell much on it, or consider that your camera’s standard JPEG output is plenty good enough, I offer this simple piece of evidence – the first image is the JPEG straight out of my Nikon D7000, the second image is the result of a few tweaks in Lightroom 4 (the beta version, which incidentally is quite an exciting upgrade to this excellent piece of software):

Working down through your image processor’s menu takes you through various exposure, color, noise reduction, and other useful corrections. The results really are quite impressive. This is not what most people would refer to as “photoshopping”, as it does not involve editing of the actual pixels (i.e. actually changing the “content” of the picture), but rather adjustments similar to those made in a darkroom when developing film. In addition, if you shoot RAW, you can actually recover under- or over-exposed images to a higher degree as well. I was going to say a lot more about the subject, but as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think the picture above has plenty to say!