Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Let's talk shop : )

In the last few weeks I have received a lot of questions about how I edit my pictures. This is such a valid question and I'm absolutely not afraid to share this information with all of you!! For some of you that understand a little bit about digital photography you may find this blog interesting...but the rest of you may think I'm talking jibberish and that's okay too. : ) On all my pricing information I inform my clients that I do "basic editing" on all photos. "Basic editing" is different for all photographers but here is some information on what basic editing is to me. I'll show you some of my process with the images below. (I used Matt and Madeline because their photos are the ones I'm editing right now- : ) )

The image below is pretty much the image straight from my camera. I photograph in the file format called RAW so this image was converted to JPG before being put in this blog and that is it. I shoot in full manuel mode-meaning I set my shutter speed and aperture based on the lighting of the area I am in. I like to keep my ISO around 200 but I will go as high as 640... anything above that and the picture becomes more "noisy" than I would prefer. The photo below was shot at f/3.5, 1/160 s, & ISO 200.
My two main goals when I'm photographing is to a) get the lighting just right and b) frame the photo so that cropping is NOT necessary! When I edit my goal is to get the photo as close to real life as I possibly can. In the image above you will notice that Matt and Madeline are a bit "gray" looking...almost to the point that you could say they look washed out. Using a magical tool called "white balance" I'm able to make their skin tones look more natural. White balance is not the only thing I have done to this picture but I can't tell you all my secrets. ; )
Here is another sequence of photos and the steps I took for basic editing. Image below shot at f/3.2, 1/160 s, ISO 200-no editing
This is the same image but I have used the white balance tool on it.
This is the finished image after I have done a few more things to it. ; )
Image shot at f/5.6, 1/125 s, and ISO 200-no editing
Same image with basic editing : )
I hope this answers some of the questions I have had about my editing process. As you can assume because I do edit all of my images it does take me a few weeks to get your photos back to you. I pride myself on being speedy with editing because I know you don't want to wait 6-months for your wedding pictures.Trust me it's worth the extra wait time to have everything edited. : )
Have a wonderful day everyone! Contact me if you have any more questions!
{b. blissful; b. blessed}
-Brittany





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