I sometimes get asked what goes into making my finished images to make them look as beautiful as they do. Well, the short answer is: “a lot“. A lot of time, skill, and a lot of love, that is. That’s a big part of why I urge my clients to invest in purchasing their prints through me, rather than taking their disk to a third party printer.
Because we shoot so many images during a wedding, we can’t touch every single one up. However, when my clients and their guests invest in prints or wedding albums through me, we take the images they’ve ordered and transform them in Photoshop before sending the image to our professional lab partner to be printed.
First we start with the “raw” image file as it comes out of the camera, and fine-tune the color, contrast, and tone making it come alive with vibrancy. We then whiten teeth, remove blemishes, soften skin and sometimes even add subtle vignetting to focus the eye on the most important parts of the image or add other special visual effects as well. This takes an incredible amount of time, training, care and skill to get just right and it’s a big part of what clients are paying for when they order prints and albums through us.
Of course, fair’s fair- everyone gets a disk of un-watermarked, printable resolution images and they’re welcome to have the files printed elsewhere, but then they’d be missing out on all the time, skill and love that we invest into the images that transform them from photographs into works of art.
Here are a handful of examples of before and after we’ve done our magic on ’em so you can see the difference for yourself:
