Wedding Photography Editing Tips and Tricks

Good editing can make all the difference to a wedding shoot. The following tips may help you to pull the most out of your photographs.

This article is intended for wedding photographers who shoot with digital cameras.

Tips:

Shoot and edit in RAW.

I can't tell you the number of times I have used RAW to save shots that would otherwise have been unusable. You obviously can't do all your editing in RAW but since RAW captures much more in formation than the highest quality JPEG most adjustments will look better done in RAW.

1. 
   Adjusting Exposure. The biggest advantage of RAW is the ability to adjust exposure, and restore blown out highlights or detail lost in deep shadows. Often however I will adjust exposure to increase already dark shadows, or blow out already bright highlights, to achieve various artistic effects or just to just increase the intensity of the photo.
   
   


2. 
   Use RAW when converting to black and white. Generally if you want a black and white image you want to do the conversion in RAW, not JPEG. Converting to back and white in RAW will result in a higher quality black and white image.
   
   


3. 
   Go easy with saturation. Over saturating a photo is an easy way to ruin a photo, and can easily look great on your screen and really bad in print.
   
   


4. 
   Don't over sharpen images. Sharpening artifacts look awful on large prints, be very careful how much you sharpen images. I prefer to just shoot with a sharper lens and then use no sharpening or noise reduction, for the most natural look possible. If you want to add punch to your images consider using curves or dodging and burning instead.
   
   

Don't wast time on bad photos

One of the biggest mistakes I have made is wasting time editing photos that will never look really great. There is really only so much you can do even with RAW, so unless it's an important shot keep your editing simple, that way you will have more time to focus on your best shots.

Tricks:

Use Vignettes

I use vignetting extensively to add depth to, or to frame my images. The trick to good vignettes is that they shouldn't be noticeable. If a vignette is noticed by a non photographer then it's to strong. I use a lot of feathering and sometimes even multiple vignettes to achieve a more powerful vignette effect that is still not obvious. I even sometimes use this vignetting technique with color filters to create depth through color, or to liven up an otherwise boring sky. There are several ways to create vignettes with photoshop, but this level of detail goes beyond the scope of this article.

If your shooting with a full frame sensor then the vignetting technique is less needed as full frame sensors capture the natural vignettes present in many lenses.

Dodge and burn

This is one of the most traditional photography techniques and was used in the darkroom long before computers where invented. For those not familiar with dodging and burning it is basically a manual way of lighting and darkening different areas of a photograph. I will often further burn, to darken shadows and give greater focus to a subject. Or, I dodge to soften the shadows on the brides face. I recommend dodging and burning because it gives you a lot of artistic control over the photographic process, whiles still allowing for a natural look.