The more you talk to people about photography, the more you will find that image editing very much divides the audience - with some people using it as a key part of their photography, while others declare that it's cheating, and say we should all 'get it right in camera'.
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The first thing to state here is that the term 'image editing' covers an extremely wide spectrum - and when I say it's important, I'm not talking about changing an entire sky in a landscape image, or adding dubious filters to portraits.
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What I am talking about is taking the 'data' which was captured by the camera, and enhancing it to create an image that is eye-catching and appealing - and arguably looks more like what the photographer saw on the day than the unedited shot does.
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The reason that an image sometimes looks underwhelming at first glance, is that no camera sensor is as good as your eyes at capturing extremes of highlight and shadow - something which is known as 'high dynamic range'. In effect your eyes look around a scene and take hundreds of 'pictures', and then your brain sticks them all together into one image, which is perfectly exposed.
But camera sensors can't do that, which means that for scenes where you have high dynamic range, you have to decide whether to expose the highlights or the shadows correctly, and then adjust the other one afterwards. Like in this example mountain image.​​​
​​​The shot on the left is straight out of camera, while the shot on the right is the final edit of this single image - and it looks just like what I could see on the day. Which I think explains why editing is important!
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The way to think of it is that, when you take the shot, you are 'capturing image data' and it's what you then do with that data afterwards which makes the final image. Yes of course, sometimes you can take a perfect shot that needs no editing - depending on the lighting conditions - but often you can't, and that's where editing really comes in.
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This also explains why beginners get frustrated because their camera images are not as good as their phone images. This is because phones on average take 15 different images, at different exposures, and stick them together in a fraction of a second - before you even see the final result.
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Of course editing isn't just about balancing exposure, and there are many other aspects to creating a final image. Things like adjusting colours, or even just cropping and straightening, all play a part. So please do bear all this in mind when going through the process of learning photography.
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One last thing to mention is that image editing also depends on the type of image file that you shoot. Most cameras are set to shoot jpeg files when they come out of the box, and this is absolutely fine. It also means that the camera software will do some editing to the image before you even see it - though it does then discard some of the image data once it has done so.
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The other alternative is to shoot in something called 'RAW', which basically means that the camera software does not edit the image at all - leaving it to the photographer to carry out the edit as they see fit. And because no image data is discarded, you have more flexibility with your editing. For example, if the above image was a jpeg file, I would definitely not have been able to recover so much of the sky detail.
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I always recommend that beginners shoot jpeg files to start with, but then if you decide in the future that you want to get serious about editing, you can start shooting RAW files as well, or even instead. But don't do it straight away, until you actually know what to do with one once you've shot it!
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I can help with anything from off-auto level tuition and learning how operate your specific camera, through to advanced skills, image editing and portfolio reviews.