Wedding photographs contain a plethora of lovely moments and splendid times. Color issues and undesired people or objects in the frame are by no means acceptable. Follow the following tips used by wedding photo editing service to refine your precious pictures like a professional.
- Lightroom Presets:
One of the many perks of Adobe Lightroom is its felicitous presets. While apt presents are already available, you can add your own custom ones as well. They are a great way to get started not just for wedding photo editing, but for any type of photograph; sometimes a befitting preset is all that is needed for post-processing.
In this example, just one custom made preset – containing “Whites” at “-9” and “Blacks” at “+27” – greatly reduced that warm, orange tone, effectively enhancing the picture’s overall visual.
- White Balance:
The next step our wedding photo retouching experts follow is the rectification of white balance using the “Temperature” and “Tint” sliders. White balance is essentially the amendment of color temperatures (i.e. warm and cool tones) in an image to make white appear as white.
“Temperature” adds refreshing blue hues by moving its slider to the left, while going to the right adds a comfortably warm yellow tone that makes skin tone appear natural. “Tint”, on the other hand, handles green and magenta shades.
In this picture, while the preset did help significantly, it is not enough. Therefore, the temperature slider is moved to the left (towards blue) to introduce cooler colors in the photo, countering those warm hues.
- Spot Removal Tool
Removal of blemishes and unwanted objects, plus skin imperfections is yet another necessary step for wedding photo editing to procure a clean photo.
- Select the “Spot Removal (Q)” tool, available in the side panel in Lightroom.
- Click on the area/blemish needed to be removed and Lightroom will intelligently copy and replace the selected spot with another suitable area, effectively eliminating the undesired patches.
- If the automatic sequence doesn’t satisfy you, click the “H” key on your keyboard and drag the brush to a suitable point of your choice to replace it.
- In the “Spot Removal” dialogue box, there are two editing options and three sliders:
- “Clone” tool – great for eliminating bigger, unwanted objects from the scene.
- “Heal” tool – removes small spots, blemishes, wrinkles and any skin imperfections, and blends the replaced area with the surrounding pixels.
- “Size” – handles the brush size of the healing tools; a small size is great for minute splodges while a bigger one is needed for larger objects.
- “Feather” – it blurs the edges of the edit to blend it with the surrounding pixels. Too high a value will completely fade the edges while too low a figure will give it a sharpness, making the spot stand out.
- “Opacity” – as the name suggests, it manages the opaqueness of the replaced area, i.e. the edit does not completely replace the undesired spot. This mode is basically for handling wrinkles; reduce the opacity so that the wrinkles are substantially reduced but not entirely lost.
- While both “Clone” and “Heal” tools work great for their respective purposes, you can apply the “Heal” tool for bigger materials as well depending on which of these two modes work best for your picture.
- Exposure and Contrast:
Our Wedding photo editing service experts understand the need for Exposure and Contrast settings to be adequately tuned to introduce vividly bright colors. Contrast is in charge of the extent of the difference between the light and dark parts of the picture, while Exposure manages the overall colors of an image.
Moving the “Exposure” slider to the right to an appropriate “+0.34” brightened the overall look of the photograph, while increasing “Contrast” slightly darkened the overly bright visual following “Exposure”.
- Highlights and Shadows
Color correction in wedding photo editing does not stop with just “Exposure” and “Contrast”. There are more modes to calibrate.
“Shadows” and “Highlights” restore the details lost due to an under or over-exposure, respectively. On the other hand, “Whites” and “Blacks” are points of complete white and complete black, respectively, where there exist no details.
In this case, while tackling “Exposure” and “Contrast” brightened the image more, the subject’s dress is becoming over-exposed; it is losing detail. So “Highlights” is reduced rather significantly to restore that detail. At the same time, “Shadows” is increased to recover details in the under-exposed parts of the image which, in this case, is the wall in the back and the subject’s eyes. “Whites” and “Blacks” are also adjusted as needed.
- Saturation and Vibrance
“Saturation” enhances all the colors in an image, while “Vibrance” focuses specifically on the under-exposed areas of the picture. Further, “Vibrance” is especially suitable for enhancing skin tone which can otherwise become exaggerated with “Saturation”. They both do wonders in color correction, provided they are applied appropriately.
Of course, wedding photo editing demands moderation for a natural result, not over-editing which could potentially destroy a serene photo. Therefore, in this photograph, both “Saturation” and “Vibrance” are only slightly increased to provide this picture an extra edge; the previous color correction modes had already refined the photo to impeccability.
These wedding photo editing guidelines should, no doubt, give you the result you are hoping for. So what are you waiting for, get started! Download & install Adobe Lightroom for Free .. Or you can also hire professionals to do the job for you.
