Editing Wedding Photos

Ideas & Inspiration

Photographer Clane Gessel changed the white balance and added a sunspot for extra effect.

Editing Wedding Photos

What can transform a bride's portrait from lovely to stunning, or even iconic? Photo editing, which Seattle wedding photographer Alex Shiu says enhances images the same way that flattering lighting and elegant furnishings can make a good meal taste even more delicious.

"If you don't have good color correcting and editing skills, the image is just flat," says Shiu, owner of Eastlake-based Alex Studio. "If you see a picture and it takes you two seconds to think about it, it's failed. I want people to look at it and say, 'Wow!' immediately."

For decades, photographers would shoot a wedding, then send the images to a lab for expert processing and retouching. The advent of digital photography made recording memories easier. But today's nearly unlimited freedom to create images is a mixed blessing.

Photographers who do more than just hand over a disc of original images spend hours in their studios after the event, winnowing the selection from thousands to dozens, correcting or manipulating the chosen images for optimal color and calibration, and then eliminating stray hairs, tan lines and other wince-worthy outcomes with tools such as Photoshop.

Not all photographers are gifted editors or have schedules that permit them to edit, two reasons Shiu launched Retouch1, the editing and retouching arm of his business, five years ago. His team now finishes wedding photos from overwhelmed photographers in Seattle and as far away as Australia and Egypt.

"People wonder, 'Why isn't my image as good as the professionals'?'" Shiu says. "It's the color; it's the border; it's the texture. Those can make it a masterpiece."

Here are some behind-the-scenes tidbits from other photographers in the know.

Using dramatic, vibrant color to emphasize a landscape (above)
Clane Gessel of Queen Anne-based Clane Gessel Photography averages about 30 weddings a year and shoots about 2,000 images per event. He backs them up on two separate hard drives, sorts them in Adobe Bridge, then edits and posts them online. He figures he spends three to four hours in post-processing work for every hour of shooting.

Gessel used a wide-angle lens called a fisheye to capture this windswept, color-saturated, romantic panorama. Rather than settle for an overcast sky, he changed the white balance on the photo to make the image "really, really red" and added a sunspot for extra effect, resurrecting the absent sun.

"Photoshop can enhance what you've done, but Photoshop cannot get you a great image from a bad one," Gessel says. "It's imperative to capture the right image the first time."

Turning a photo into art (above)
Loren Callahan and Kimberly Person, the team at Shoreline-based Alante Photography, shoot precisely. They focus on making fewer, more exceptional images. They estimate that 40 hours per wedding is spent meeting with clients, shooting and, later, editing and fine-tuning images. Person says digital photography and photo-editing software have "really just freed up a ton of different styles." Before going digital, she'd have to use different film speeds and develop film in specific ways to achieve a desired effect.
"Now it's an aftereffect. I can shoot any image and make that effect happen," Person says.

In this leafy, stylish portrait, the Alante team has "artworked" the original image to achieve a striking twist on the charming scene, and, in turn, evoke a different sense of time and place.

"It takes time to adjust, and is all very custom done," Callahan says. "It's not just the push of a button."

Correcting color (above)
Carol Harrold of Carol Harrold Photography in West Seattle fully transitioned to digital photography in 2008 after 14 years of shooting with film. Rather than experimenting with digital's expansive special effects, she limits her alternatives to mostly sepia tones and black-and-whites, preferring a more classic, timeless approach.

Photo-editing software can give any image a vintage feel, but it takes a skilled eye to make a truly crisp black-and-white, she says. She estimates she spends at least 20 hours per wedding getting everything in shipshape, including color correction, cropping and other editing. It's that attention to detail that gives this photo of a glowing bride and her clutch of bridesmaids at DeLille Cellars an extra boost of radiance.

"If you look at my original, it's a decent exposure," Harrold says. "But I need to correct the color to make it really pretty." She used Photoshop to smooth flyaway hairs, but otherwise focused only on tone. "The color of those dresses was so gorgeous, I really wanted them to pop and look great."

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