This is a photo I really liked from Debra and Andrew’s wedding at Christ’s Church, Bethesda, in December, but like most of the photos taken during the ceremony it suffers from too much red caused by overhead heaters.
Thankfully photoshop makes it fairly easy to make it look much better, and in this case I converted it to black & white as well.
I’m putting this post up for the benefit of other photographers and so clients can see an example of what post-processing involves which, after all, is a large part of what they’re paying for.
I think Photoshop can be overwhelming to someone unfamiliar with the software, but it’s pretty essential to get the most out of your photos and it’s not too hard to do things like colour correction and B&W conversion.
In CS4 I often try Image>Autocolor because it’s pretty good at making the colour in your photograph look much better, but it takes a bit of trial and error to find out when it works best.
In Photoshop Elements that are some other auto-corrections, I seem to recall the ‘adjust for skin tone’ being particularly good.
In this example Autocolor couldn’t compensate for the reds at all, so I did it manually.
Step 1
Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation
Image>Adjustments>Color Balance
The Hue/Saturation option allows you to selectively desaturate different colour channels. This works well if you desaturate by just a few percentage points, overdo it and the photo starts to look unnatural.
I use the Color Balance option more often. In this case I changed the red in the shadows, midtones and highlights by about 10 points towards cyan and for a lot of photographs this amount of tweaking is enough.
However, I still didn’t think the colours looked that great so I tried a B&W conversion.
Step 2
Image>adjustments>Black & White
I never take photographs in B&W because it seems silly to discard colour information at the camera stage. There might be a good argument for taking B&W shots in camera, but personally I don’t see the point.
(I also shoot jpegs rather than in RAW because I find it quicker and easier to work with smaller files which, for me, outweighs the information benefits of RAW.)
With Black & White conversion I try the Auto button first, and find I’m happy with the result about half the time.
The best method is to move the sliders back and forwards until the photo looks how you want it. In this case it was all about the red and yellow sliders.
Step 3
Image>adjustments>curves
I find that photos often don’t ‘pop’ as much as they should when they’re first converted to B&W.
The way to fix this is with curves, which allow you control things like brightness and contrast very precisely.
In the example above I moved the top-right corner of the line slightly left which changed the darkest parts of the image to black. In this image the bench in the foreground was darkened and thus highlighted the girl more.
Curves take a while to get your head round, but if you mess about with them a bit you’re bound to get some good results.
Step 4
Filter>distortion>lens correction … Vignette
A vignette is where the outside of the image is darkened (or lightened) and usually I don’t really like the look it gives a photograph.
In some instances, though, it helps highlight the main subject, in this case the girl.
You can adjust the darkness and midpoint of the vignette until you’re happy with what you see.
The example below used the same steps as above, but without the B&W conversion.
The red was quite extreme in the original photo but a combination of ‘color balance’ and desaturation did a pretty good job of fixing it.
This photo doesn’t look so good in B&W because there isn’t a very large tonal range (light), but it’s quite hard to tell if B&W will look any good until you actually try it.
These processes are straight forward and quite quick to do (depending on how many images you’re editing), but what takes the time is messing round to see what looks best.
If you have any questions, either photographic or regarding what I can for you as a client, please feel free to email me at info@tomsimoneweddings.co.uk
