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Let’s dive into the mysterious world of wedding photography post production. It doesn’t matter if your wedding photographer is from Newport, Rhode Island; New York City, New York; or San Francisco, California; post-production is and should be an integral part of your wedding photography experience.
What is Post-Production?
Post production goes by a few names. Editing, touch-up, retouching, processing, etc… They are all essentially talking about the same main thing – taking your wedding photos the way the camera captures them and transforming them into a final product the way that you as a bride or groom sees them. Some tools used for this process are Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, and so on.
The Dirty Details
Your wedding photographer should be photographing your wedding day in RAW format. The alternative is shooting in JPG mode, which is a compressed format. We’ll skip the engineering lesson and skip right to why it matters to you as a bride or groom. It boils down to this – who’s spending the time to make the decisions about how each photo needs to get treated? Your wedding photographer, or their camera? When a wedding photographer shoots in RAW format, they then have to take the photos and post-process them when the event is over. When shooting in JPG format, the camera uses its predetermined setting to figure out what to apply to the photograph. I think you can probably guess which method yields higher quality results.
The Subtle Details
There is a thing known as batch-processing. This is when the photographer takes a large group of photographs and applies the same setting to them in one fell swoop. While still probably one notch up than just shooting in JPG mode, it doesn’t give each photo the individual attention it needs. Of course, it saves significant time for the photographer since they can edit 200 photos in the same amount of time it would normally take to do 1.
The Takeaway
What does all of this mean to the bride and groom? All you’re looking for is to get the best possible photos from your wedding day. The reason this post-processing topic is important is because this is half the battle of getting to your goal. A lot of the style you see from a photographer comes from their post-processing technique. Be careful of just seeing a photographer’s portfolio and assuming that you will end up with 300 photos that all have the same level of quality as that. They may have edited their portfolio photos one by one but normally batch edit the rest of the wedding. Like we talked about before, it is hugely important to view full bodies of work from your wedding photograper so you can see consistency and continuity in their photographs.
Ask about their workflow. It’s OK to ask if they edit their photos individually, batch edit, or don’t edit at all. A good wedding photographer will generally spend more time in post-production than they do actually photographing your wedding day. That means that a lot of your investment is paying for that post-production time. Wouldn’t you want to make sure you’re getting what you think you’re paying for?
Extra Credit (Optional Reading)
If you’re wondering about what happens in post-production specifically, then read on. The majority of photos require basic adjustments and retouching. There are some photos that require some heavier lifting (such as eye swaps, object removals, etc…), but we’ll focus on the basic things that every one of your photos should have done to it.
The following are the parameters that need to be tweaked in order to take a RAW file from a dull camera capture to a finished image that looks polished and complete: Exposure, contrast, white balance, levels, curves, vibrancy, saturation, clarity, sharpness, vignetting, cropping, fill light, whites, blacks, and shadows. These are the basics which get adjusted for every single photos that passes through a Blueflash camera. Most of them are self-explanatory terms, others are a little more ambiguous. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Below you will see some side by side comparisons of a RAW photo as it comes out of the camera and the finished and edited image once it’s done being processed (unedited on top, edited on bottom). Which do you want to receive from your wedding day?
Series information
Next we’ll be talking about “Photographer for Life”. We’ll explain what it is, how it came to be, and why it matters in your choice of wedding photographer.
If you missed the intro to this series, you can catch it right here – How To Choose Your Rhode Island Wedding Photographer Series Introduction.
