wedding photo retouching

photorelive · April 20, 2010

wedding photographers .. how do you retouch the wedding photos !?

i think most of the wedding retouching now is all about colors , adding special color effects .. and very little smoothing or enhancing for the skin ..

zoomer · April 20, 2010

I do very little.
On extreme closeups of the bride I usually will do a little.
If it is a closeup of the bride and groom it gets dicey because no guy looks good with his skin cleaned up much.

For anything past 5 feet or so I leave the skin alone, or if the bride has decent skin to begin with I do very little skin clean up.

And this may sound really bad but the truth is, the prettier the girl the more likely I am to do some cleanup on her skin. Don't know why it is but to my eye at least, pretty girls can take more skin cleanup and still look natural,
less attractive girls start to look unnatural much quicker when you start cleaning their skin up.....probably just me.

Instead of skin cleanup I tend to just increase the exposure of the photo....presto instant skin clean up...

mmmatt · April 20, 2010

zoomer wrote:

And this may sound really bad but the truth is, the prettier the girl the more likely I am to do some cleanup on her skin. Don't know why it is but to my eye at least, pretty girls can take more skin cleanup and still look natural,
less attractive girls start to look unnatural much quicker when you start cleaning their skin up.....probably just me.

Interesting view Zoomer!

I do as little as possible. I hate the look of brushed skin. I think some people expect a little though, so I will do it on closeups sometimes. Bad acne I will clone out on important shots and offer to do the rest for a few extra bucks. I put it in my contract that I don't do any, but I do some when warranted without charge. No way a whole set though without extra $$. I've honestly never put any time into learning any more than basic retouching, because I don't care for the look. I use a trad action called "pro retouch" and that makes it a little easier for me. I'm certainly not good though. I prefer to play with my creative processing, so I put my time into that.

This is about the most I ever do.

Matt

Tim Kamppinen · April 22, 2010

First two weddings I did, I retouched every photo to some degree (about 500 or so for each wedding). That meant photoshop work to enhance color, contrast, and sharpening, plus skin retouching, at least on the bride and groom, as needed.

That was a ridiculous amount of work. I'd hate to think what my hourly rate came out to be for those two weddings (especially since I shot them for dirt cheap in the first place).

Anyway, my third wedding is this weekend. From here on out, I'm only editing photos in camera raw (or Lightroom, I've been checking out the 3.2 beta and thinking of switching over) and not doing any retouching (it sucks trying to do it in lightroom anyway. Just color, contrast, maybe some dodging and burning with the exposure brush if needed, possibly a subtle vignette. No spot removal tool... I really hate trying to retouch skin with that thing. Anyway, those photos will be exported and uploaded to the online gallery, and if they purchase a disc that's what they get on it. If they order prints from me directly, then I will retouch and enhance them in photoshop before printing. I'll also take some of my favorites, give them the full treatment, and post them on my blog to whet their appetite. Also, anything that goes into an album will be a finished photo as well.

wedding photo retouching

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