The retail processing labs that produce the vast majority of prints from film or digital cameras process thousands of pictures every day. Faced with today’s staggering variety of available cameras and constantly changing technologies, the common practice is to print to a standard even the lowest quality camera can achieve.

This means that what you see in your final print is often much less than what your camera really saw and captured. In the past, enhancing an individual image was a lengthy process used primarily in commercial photography or the printing industry, an expensive procedure not very practical for the rest of us.

But things have changed. The digital workflow has dramatically reduced the time and cost of image editing, and the sophistication of today’s tools allow our pictures to speak as never before.

And when a picture speaks, we all listen. Take a look at some examples, send us one of your own favorites, and discover everything your own pictures have to say.

where the picture speaks.