Jul 14 2010
Retouching Wedding Photographs #2 – Shoes
Cliff Moutner, stated to be “One of the top ten wedding photographers in the world” by American Photo Magazine is a photographer who has impacted my photographic life even though we’ve never met. I find a lot of similarities in our thought processes from what I’ve read and heard from him over the past few months. He is very good at walking into any situation and making the best of what is available from a lighting and architectural perspective.
The wedding I captured last week with my cameras had some very interesting lighting which made me think out of the box just a bit so that I could make the best of what I had been given. It was at a small church and the bride was getting the final touches in one of the sunday school rooms that was designed for what I’m guessing were first and second grade kids. I gathered that by my shins bumping into the bright green tabletops in the room. I wanted to get some good photos of the bride’s shoes and thought I would give the green table a try, knowing that I’d need to do something with it after the fact. Here is what I came up with as shown in the before and after image.
Here are the steps to take it from beginning to end:
- The shoes were photographed from a backlit perspective with natural light coming in through the window.
- I let the camera pick the exposure which left plenty of detail on the dark side of the shoes, but totally blew out a portion of the tabletop.
- In Adobe Lightroom, I first converted the image to black and white since I knew I didn’t want the green in the photo. I contemplated changing the green tint to blue, but I liked the black and white so much that I stopped there.
- This was followed by brightening up the areas in the image that had the original green tint to make the tabletop a bit more uniform in brightness. That also lightened up the bottom of the shoes that originally had the green reflection.
- I then brought out the blacks a bit more for added contrast.
That was about it as far as tweaking the image. Next time you are in a difficult lighting situation, make the best of what you have. You could end up with something cool.
