Image editing practices, as ubiquitous as they are common, have always accompanied photographic processes. Since their democratization through digital editing software, their potentials have spread just as much as debates about the status of the photographic image have changed (again). Currently, image editing practices are once again undergoing a phase of technical, aesthetic, and economic transformation through generative techniques. This framework provides the occasion for a historical examination of these diverse practices. How has work on images been shaped since around 1990? For a reconstruction, I analyze instructive texts and videos, as they represent keys in the transfer of knowledge about image processing and editing. In their instructional character, they refer on the one hand to technical functions, but on the other hand also provide information about social practices. Based on an approach to the concept of image editing and its implicit understanding of the image, I analyze the functions, continuities, and ruptures of image editing under digital horizons, using the first Photoshop tutorial from 1990. Image editing is understood not as a marginal phenomenon, but conversely as a central infrastructure of the (digital) photographic image. It becomes clear that the terminology of image editing is based on images that are somehow already finished. However, examination shows that this conceptual separation of image and editing can at best identify a specific historical ensemble of devices, which also always refers to aesthetic conventions of the time and or counter-reactions to them. A look at the development of practices since around 1990, both in terms of functional equipment and in the networking and mobilization of software, also makes evident the ways that images remain unfinished.