Des Moines Wedding Photographer – Life Art Photographs » Professional wedding and portrait photographer serving Des Moines and surrounding areas in and around Iowa. Available for travel nationwide.

This is a topic of interest for anyone who is thinking about purchasing photography (especially digital wedding photos), and the answer tends to be different with each photographer. Editing a photo can make a good photo great and can even change tone of the image if you want it to. I’m a person who sticks to a fairly traditional look when it comes to editing. Yes, I do admit that it can be fun to do some creative editing, but generally my philosophy is that a photo should look like a photo and my job is to turn good into great. When you’re shooting digitally and in RAW format, there is always a little bit of work left to do once you get back to the computer. At the very least, you need to go in convert the photo to jpg format so that your clients can use the photo later.

The left photo below is an example of an image that was taken straight out of the camera (SOOC). The photo on the right is an example of what I deliver to clients when they purchase the digital negatives. I’ve cropped it just a bit and have also gone in and adjusted the settings a bit in order to make sure things came out the way I intended them to when I shot the photo. This photo would look great if a client went to a local lab to get it printed. However, this photo could look even better if I were to go back in and do some retouching in order to make it absolutely perfect.

In the next example we’ll compare the same image as was shown above (the photo labeled ‘digital negative’) to a fully retouched version of the same photo. This is the type of treatment that I use on photos that are purchased as prints through my lab or that are featured in an album. She is still the same beautiful girl in both photos, but going in with a fine-tooth comb and making sure that everything pops just the way that you want it to makes all the difference in the world. I’ve also taken the time to darken up the distracting elements in the background of the photo as well in order to make sure that your eye is drawn right into the subject of the photo and have softened up her skin just a tad to give her back that bridal glow that she had in person.

Finally, here is a look at all three versions side-by-side you you can better compare the transition from beginning to end.

Of course, the most important component to getting a good photograph is always going to be to shoot it correctly in camera so that  your processing is used to enhance good photos, rather than to fix mistakes.