Every wedding shoot turns out different, but what they all have in common is that things don’t go to plan and less than ideal photos result. In a perfect world, weather, lighting and timing will all come together to form a magical on-screen moment. Alas, this doesn’t happen outside of Disney animations.
Professional cameras and lighting equipment like kicker lights can accommodate for a number of situations. But it’s the editing that carries the photos over the line to be ‘final album’ worthy. So, we’ve put together some tips to better your wedding photos.
Firstly, it’s essential to enhance the clarity of the photo. It can feel like it’s all happening at once come wedding day so the last thing the client will want are blurred, noisy, washed out images when looking back…
Play around with exposure, highlights & shadows, and contrast to create a soft even glow cross your subject. Light is coming from all sides through the big day, from direct sunlight to DJ strobes. You always want the subject to stand out from the background so create sharp lines.
The saturation tool (colour intensity) can be used to remove haze. Your photoshop software should also allow you to adjust colour, brightness, and detail noise which is valuable as you also don’t want grainy or pixelated images surfacing in the final album.
Colour temperature is another option to toggle with. This is a measure of the light’s colour on a spectrum from orange warm to cool to blue. Temperature affects how the image appears. You don’t want a wedding party of orange Oompa Loompas, but you could adjust the hue to really bring to life that warm glow in the hall.
There are many different tools you can play around with to enhance the appearance of your wedding photos. Not to mention, you have a number of retouch tools such as spot removal to eliminate imperfections, and tools like soft blurs to add artistic value.
Experiment and get creative. However avoid the common trap of getting so hung up on every little detail that you lose valuable time. Don’t waste time deciding between two points of difference in contrast. The newly weds won’t notice this, but they will notice inconsistencies, and they will notice photos that don’t hit their brief. Did they want black and white? Bright photos? Or that ‘natural look’? Often less is more.
