Wedding Photography Retouching

I’ve been in this industry a long time now.  It doesn’t seem like it, but I’ve spent half my life focused on photography.  I don’t feel like I’m old enough to say that.  Being a part of the art of photography for the last 18 years, I’ve seen a lot of changes.  I started with film, learning how to get a great shot, but also learning how to make a great print.  It was never as simple as just printing the negative, the image had to be coaxed out, to be the best it could be.   With digital photography, the barriers to get into this industry have come down tremendously; unfortunately, that’s a whole lot of people who don’t understand the full art and process of photography.

There’s an art to working with the subject, an art to lighting, to exposing the image in camera, an art to developing the image, and what’s most often forgotten these days… an art to printing and finishing the image.

I’ve spent the last 18 years mastering each of these steps so that you don’t have to.

While most photographers can do a fair bit better than the straight out of camera image, very few have the skill and expertise to take the image to its full potential (adding some crazy filters doesn’t count, although they do have a place, they’re often used to hide the fact that an image just isn’t that great on its own).

While tastes vary and you may prefer a natural looking image to a “wow” or “hero” image like the one below, it doesn’t actually change the amount of retouching needed for a great finished image.

Either way, when choosing your photographer, make sure you select someone who won’t just hand over the files, but who will -rather- create art for you.  A photograph printed on display tells a 1000 words, a digital file gets lost and buried under the never ending deluge of images and content being generated constantly in this day and age.  Please, oh please! print your images.

Chelsea & Reid had a gorgeous wedding a few weeks ago at the Catta Verdera Country Club in Lincoln, relatively near our Sacramento studio.  This past Sunday they came in to select images for their wedding album. The image below was chosen for their wedding album cover.  It will be printed under acrylic and will look phenomenal when finished.

The following are all versions of the same image in the various stages from straight out of camera to the album cover version:

While we’d never normally show this version, I always think it’s interesting to look at the original image, exactly as the camera saw it.

This has not been modified in any way from how it was taken (minus the logo).

 

Catta Verdera Wedding Photography

 

This version of the image is a little behind the scenes trick we use on occasion. When an image is so bright that details are lost, we can often go back to the original raw file and process a special version just for those details. In this case, the veil behind Chelsea’s head was blown out to pure white in our standard version above, so that we could no longer see the detail in the veil. In this version as you can see, most of the detail is back (by underexposing the overall image) and by layering the two images, we’re able to make a special composite that brings those details back in.

Catta Verdera Wedding Photography

 

This version is the image as originally shown to our couple. This is what we call an edited image.

It has been processed well beyond the original file straight from the camera, but it hasn’t been extensively retouched like the following versions.

Catta Verdera Wedding Photographer

 

This version is the full image, retouched.

Catta Verdera Wedding Photography

 

A panoramic crop can increase impact. If I was going to put this image on my wall, this is probably how I would crop it.

Catta Verdera Wedding Photography

 

Sometimes, there are very specific crops we need to allow for, an album cover for example.

To fit the cover correctly, a fair portion of the image had to be trimmed. To keep the veil showing as much as possible, we cropped the left side in and up to help put them in a more visually intriguing position within the frame.

One subtle thing that’s often missed when images are cropped is that it can create awkward areas. In this case, the bottom left corner showed a section of the path (as seen in the other images) but without context, it just looked like a random brown triangle, so the grass was filled in, making a more visually cohesive result.

Catta Verdera Wedding Photography

 

We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments!  Please leave us a note below and let us know if you’d like to see more posts like this one.

Mischa Purcell Cr.Photog.

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