Image editing is considered a creative, artistic act. Image editing is done for removing unwanted elements such as dust specks and scratches, adjusting the geometry of the image like rotating and cropping, correcting for lens aberrations, sharpening or softening the image, making color changes or adding special effects to the image.

Often the tasks involved in image editing are repetitive and need intense processing. Manual image editing done on traditional analog photographs requires a high level of expertise and attention to detail. Image editing software applications are also available for editing images. Unlike other conventional methods, these tools provide advanced image editing operations like data compression, photo organization and selection of image properties.