Wedding Photo Adjustments

In this post I'll be showing & discussing some editing techniques I used for some amatuer wedding photography.

The pictures are from my husband's beautiful cousin, Blair's wedding just over 2 years ago. Blair & her high school sweetheart, Adam, were married down in Mississippi - it was totally worth the drive! They're a God-loving couple, joined in His Love and Grace. A beautiful ceremony, followed by an equally gorgeous reception with hor d'oeuvres galore, southern sweet tea, cake, and much more. Enough about how much I enjoyed myself though, how about some photos from the big day, huh?

One of the sweetest shots of the day, but it's a little busy...

So, let's just do a simple cropping & just a little color enhancement.

Much better!

There's so much that can be done with even the simplest picture though - not just cropping. Lets take this next picture a step further:

Crop it...

Blur the background on it...

And turn it into back & white with the bouquet in color...

I faded the color out just a bit more on this next one (fade desaturate) and liked it even more...

Almost looks professional, doesn't it.

Here's another photo that's pretty good, but again can totally be made better.
Replacing the background or even a simple cropping would make a world of difference.

Why not do both?

Cropped with an elegant black vignette.

Little changes can definitely make big differences.

Something else I like to do for wedding shots is to take a photo of the bride's bouquet, blur it, fade the edge...

And it can be used as a background for almost any picture.


Finally, my absolute favorite picture - after editing of course.
Started off with (out of all honesty) a mediocre shot at best. There are too many distractions in the background, and look at the hideous shadow around the groom! But I loved the moment that it captured of the couple.

So I started out by duplicating the layer. On the original layer I used a heavy gaussian blur filter, and on the copied layer I used the magic wand tool to trace around the couple (with a very light feathering... I think 5 - 10?). I then inversed the selection & just deleted the area around them. Which made the picture look like...
A much classier image - but still not the perfection I was seeking. The distracting background is gone, but so is their floor & wall... it looks like they're floating, doesn't it? Not to worry! I still had a trick or two up my sleeve to polish it up some more.

Like this! Not your typical black & white, huh? That's right, it's not. I went to image -> adjustments -> gradient map, and selected the metals option. It should be pretty obvious which one of the metals I used.

I was pretty happy with it at this point, but I decided to add one last little touch...

Now, this type of editing can't be used with just any picture. But with the right ones, the results are just spectacular. Note: the 'metals - black & white' should NEVER be used on big, huge, happy, toothy smiles. The results are often horrific instead of terrific!

Hope this gives you all some ideas of what I can do, and also some things to try for yourselves! Feel free to hit me up with questions, and of coarse pictures of your own that you'd like for me to edit. Much love to all and God Bless!