I had a great time on Saturday shooting Jessica and Brian’s engagement session… it’s coming on the start of our busy season, as we’ve got a ton of weddings between now and November… and of course, we’ve still got a lot of engagement sessions to get to. Our open slots in May for engagement sessions on the weekends are almost filled, and I’m sure June will be filling up fast. I know we’ve posted a bunch of video lately, and we’ve still got more to post under that category, but I’ll be posting a lot more engagement sessions and weddings coming up. Jessica and Brian will get a post for their engagement session, but I wanted to post a couple of pictures showing some of our editing.
Below we’ve got three images lined up, all at different stages in the editing process. The first image is straight out of camera (SOOC)… a straightforward picture of Jessica and Brian, highlighting the Vanderbilt Mansion behind them. I like the image, but I’ll look through every image and process them, the same way film used to get processed in the old days in a dark room (though I’m using a program called LightRoom). For the middle image, I’ve increased the blacks of the image, basically increasing the shadows. Then for the final image in that set, I’ve done a little sharpening and warmed up the color of the image.
That third image is the one I’d go with… it’s richer and a bit warmer. My goal with most of the editing that I do is to make it look very natural and just enhance what is there. Of course, when you work on editing in LightRoom and then Photoshop, it’s easy to get carried away and add too much to an image… adding too much fake blur, too much of a glow, exaggerated vignettes, too much color processing… to me this isn’t my taste and I avoid “over editing”. However, I will add elements tastefully. For this particular image, I’ve gone a step further that I don’t always take with all images. I’ve taken the final image (the third one above) and added a texture to it, I separated some of the shadows, and added a little bit of “punch” to the image. This is just, again, to show you the care that goes into the images that we shoot. We put thought into what lighting we’re going to use for the day, what lenses we’re going to use for a particular shot (in this case a wide angle to capture the couple and the entranceway to the mansion) and we put thought into each image during post processing as well.
Here’s another example… the side by side images show the editing process… the first image below is straight out of camera, the image next to it had did some post-processing on the tone of the image, I also added a slight vignette around the edges… for the final image below the two, I did warm up and punch the overall color, and I sharpened the image as well.
These next couple of images of Jessica and Brian are straight out of camera and that’s how they’re going to stay, because they just look perfect that way to me…
And here is the final image I’ll post of the editing process… here’s an image SOOC, which again, I like, and then the final image below that one is edited into a black and white image… not just desaturated, but care was taken to make it a great black and white image.
So there’s a little bit of insight into some of the editing we do on images… and a little bit of a look at the great day I had with Jessica and Brian! I’ll be seeing them again soon at the Poughkeepsie Grand in June for their wedding… and I know I’ll be seeing some of you soon for your engagement sessions.
Be well.
-Ryan.
