Digital photography isn’t just about pointing the camera and pressing the trigger. I do a decent amount of post-processing to my images to get the look I want or correct the mistakes I made. I usually try to limit my post work to the features I have in Adobe Lightroom. This pretty much matches anything you could do with film in a darkroom in the past (though it would take a lot more time). It also lets me work with my original RAW images so that I don’t loose any quality.
I’m including the image as shot so that you can see the drastic difference between the original and the final result. In the case of this image, I didn’t make a mistake (though I do that often) but instead I took the photo with the final result in mind. With the intense light on the subject and monotonous background I figured I’d be able to get a result like this in post.