Post Processing Wedding Photos - An Example

 Post processing is an important part of wedding photography. It's the difference between a  wedding photo that looks ok and a wedding photo that looks great. To help demonstrate this point I have included an example below

The picture above is the original image. While it is a wedding photo in that it contains a Bride and a Groom and looks kind of nice there is a lot of room for improvement. 

• First off the colour temperature is off; The Bride's dress is blue and the sunset isn't as stunning as it could be
• There is a strange spot of lens flare down by the Bride's legs
• There is something strange in the lower left corner

Luckily as the photo was shot in RAW format all of these issues can be corrected. If this photo has been shot as a jpeg we would not be able to change the colour temperature.

The results of the post processing are below:

To get from the original image to this image:

• The colour temperature was warmed up to make the dress white and the sunset more orange
• The lens flare was removed
• A vignette was added to darken the corners of the image and draw the eye towards the centre. Fortunately this has also knocked out the strange object in the lower left. If it hadn't the object could have been removed using a clone or heal tool.

Good stuff! This adjusted image now takes pride of place on my wedding photography website.

While these adjustments were made using Lightroom they can also be made with free software. By combining Gimp with ufRAW you will be able to open RAW files and heal irregularities (such as the lens flare in the original shot) in the image.