My endless journey to photography mastery plus pictures I've found worthwhile.
While doing my Week of The Gimp, I decided to look at my older pictures, particularly at some I liked from Indonesia.
I did some very limited editing on this one:
The result can be seen here: 
I suggest to compare them big on black: old vs. new
All I did was a curves adjustment, saturation and lightening up some parts of the picture (particularly the palms in the lower right), adding contrast and removing brightness from the sky.
I always wanted to learn graphic editing. Even though I'm unblessed by talent artwise, I still like the idea of picture manipulation
As I've shown in this set, I have some basics. I also know about curves and primitive cloning. But especially curves are something I do rather in Capture NX 2 which isn't a graphic editor but a RAW converter with some editing facilities (which are enough most of the time, that's the main reason I didn't learn enough doing real editing yet).
But I want more. I want more control over my pictures, more possibilities.
I agree that Photoshop is standard but I didn't find a viable way to obtain it w/o paying 1,000 € so far. Thus I'm going for The Gimp for now. With the additional bonus that it runs also on Linux. I'm sure, the important stuff will be easily transferable once I'll have PS.
So this week I will work through a Gimp book, ideally cover-to-cover.
