A lot of people have a misconception that most of the work a wedding photographer does is at a wedding.

It would make sense if that were the case, but it’s not. A better title for the job could be Marketer-Communicator-Planner-Therapist-Photographer-Editor-Giver.

This blog post is going to be about the “Editor” part of the job.

Another misconception people have is that the photos I deliver are the photos straight out of the camera. While as a photographer the photos straight out of camera are technically very good and the composition is right (we hope), they aren’t always as colorful or vibrant or contrasty or warm or cool or skintones look funny or SOMETHING.

Here are some before and afters of my work so you can see what I’m talking about! I hope it goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyways, the first pictures are the straight out of camera shots, the second are the processed images!

This one I needed to brighten a bit and cool off the greens to match my style a bit. This was towards the end of summer so she had a nice tan going on, so I needed lessen the oranges as cameras pick up orange a lot and make them EXTRA orangey (why you should not go to a tanning salon or get a spray tan before a photo shoot).

I didn’t need to do much brightening to this one but I did cool off the greens a bit to make them look more green and less yellow. I did need to bring up the shadows on this one!

To enhance the sunset, I needed to brighten the image, increase the contrast, adjust the magenta tones in the image, and add a graduated filter to bring out the colors in the sky a bit!

These cuties 🙂 – for this shot, I needed to brighten the image and bring up the shadows (see how much clearer you can see their pretty faces?) and adjust the greens so they don’t look as muddy-yellow! I also needed to warm up the image a bit to make the color of their skin tones nice and natural looking.

I had to add a black and white to the mix. I am a BIG fan of my black and white images (I would love to shoot an entire session and edit it in all black and white but I also love bright, bold colors and GREEN if you can’t tell so I struggle with this). For this shot, I had to desaturate the entire thing (remove all color), increase the contrast (the mark of a good black and white is high contrast in my own opinion), adjust the highlights so I could still see detail in her dress, and increase the clarity. I don’t TOUCH the clarity in my color images, but in my black and white images I add more clarity to make the images punch more.

As a Marketer-Communicator-Planner-Therapist-Photographer-Editor-Giver the EDITOR part always takes the most amount of time (at least for me). People regularly think prices for wedding photography are too high because they only see the hours of work that happen during the PHOTOGRAPHER role of our job.

Hope you all enjoyed this peek into wedding photography!!