Jul 11 2010
Retouching Wedding Photographs #1 – The Bride
Over the next few days I will show examples of how to take some photographs and make them even better. Well, at least in my opinion they look better than the originals out of the camera. Plus, my wife says so too, so that says something. :-)
This last week I got to capture the wedding photos for a very nice couple. In about 4 hours time, we had the wedding and an awesome reception at the bride’s parents house. The back yard had white Christmas light in the hedges surrounding the yard. This made for an awesome backdrop to the photos.
The image below is of the bride, showing the image as it came out of the camera and what I ended up presenting to the family. Here are a few things that I did to make it look to my liking:
- Increased the overall exposure
- Modified the color balance so that white was white
- Increased the intensity some of the leaves in the background
- Added some vignetting to darken the corners just a bit to help bring the focus to the subject
- Did some minor touchup work on the brides face to make any blemishes a bit less conspicuous
- Did a minor push up on the bottom of the brides chin to make it more acceptable to her
Next time you have a photo that is nice, but not great, try some retouching ideas and see what you end up with. Be sure you modify a copy of the original in case you go too far with your retouching.
