I have Photoshop which I used for many years, but recently I've been using Aperture because of its easy work-flow. Aperture doesn't allow me to type copyright notices on the face of the photo as Photoshop does, but it does allow me to add them to the photo metadata. Except for things like rotate, crop, sharpen, and remove dust it doesn't have pixel based editing. Correction: it has one "clone pixels" tool but I only use it to remove bits of dust or tiny bugs like aphids or thrips.
I find that my camera typically produces photos that are pretty close to what I see. But I have yet to own a camera that gets dark rose reds and dark purples right every time. Most adjustment, then, is to bring the photo more in line with what I saw. But of course there is always a temptation to try to make it just a little better than what I saw. Aperture doesn't have an airbrush tool and I couldn't paint a square box blue with one if there were.
I think one can make a pretty clear distinction between making adjustments to fine tune "how you perceive what's there" and actually "changing what's there." Rules about that difference can be found at DPChallenge: Simple Editing Rules. Generally speaking, if you do pixel editing, that's "changing what's there." At the other end of the spectrum, rules that don't move pixels at all but simply make subtle changes to how colors and light and dark are expressed over the whole photo affect only how you perceive what's depicted; they don't change what's depicted.
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One of the things I have been realizing about my rose gardening right now is that I feel some pressure to create nice, photogenic roses which can sometimes make gardening less fun. I have been growing more interested in your candid style of garden photos, Toni. And it occurs to me I may need to think more in terms of once-flowering climbers, polyanthas and floribundas than in terms of HT roses in order to "paint the garden." I noticed that Monet at Giverny had two gardens which, I assume, he planted serially. The first depended on flowering plants for color. The second, the space with his pond and that timeless oriental arch bridge, he planted with foliage plants and the foliage painted the garden for him (saving a lot in time and art supplies
). The only rose he had in his gardens, by the way, was Paul's Scarlet Climber which he used to "throw color high into the air."
