Tips for Editing Wedding Photos (Guest post)

Wedding photography is extremely fun, and it lets you apply your creative skills unrestrained. With the market brimming with amazing quality cameras, good photography comes easy even to those with basic skills and knowledge. However, if you want to create an impact with your clicks, proper photo editing is probably the way to go.

Just like photography, photo editing is an art itself. After you shoot a wedding, what you do with the photos is very important. Considering the huge number of pictures and the high expectations that are placed on the results, wedding photo editing can be creative and also wearisome at the same time.

A number of free, paid or online photo editing software are now easily available. Regardless of whatever software you choose, here are a few useful wedding photography editing tips that could help you come up with some incredible keepers.

Before you begin editing wedding photos

Photo editing often calls for working with large files. This may include copying the raw image files from the camera to your local computer, the editing process itself, and finally saving the edited files. It is important to backup images when working with photos.

•    Have several backups, for example on external hard drives, DVDs, or network drives.
•    Always edit only the duplicate copies that you have made of the images. Preserve the orig unless you're shooting in RAW.
•    It is worth noting that for accurate photo prints, your monitor must also reproduce precise colors and shades.

For that artistic touch

 Wedding photos are meant to be classic and elegant. While you can experiment with modern techniques, make sure that you do not go overboard with the effects. Throwing in your creativity at the right place, and mixing and matching different styles can be very effective in producing breathtaking photographs.

The classic B&W: Grayscale has a charm of its own. Some cameras come with a black and white mode. However, converting color photographs to black and white during the editing process is known to give better results.

Soft focus: Soft focus effect adds a certain ethereal haze or halo element to crisp photographs. This can create a nice artistic touch to wedding pictures.

Dodge and burn: Dodging and burning lighten and darken different areas in a photograph to create an artistic yet natural look. For instance, shadows on the brides face can be softened by dodging while burning can intensify shadows to enhance focus on a subject.

Vignettes: This artistic effect that involves lightening or darkening the edges of a picture can draw a viewer’s attention into the photo.

Multiple exposures: You can experiment with traditional multiple exposure techniques to create contemporary styled photographs.

Cross processing: Cross processed photographs have both a color cast and a high contrast to them, and are growing more popular through magazine adverts. The unique style of cross processing has made it a preference in wedding photography.

Pop art: Go contemporary with a pop art wedding photograph. Pop art uses simple, bright blocks of colors contrary to blending effects. Photographs of people best suit the pop art style.

Color popping: Popping generally works well with wedding photographs and it emphasizes a colorful and bright part of an image. For instance, flowers can be a good choice for popping in wedding photography.

Good editing can help take your wedding photographs to a whole new level. If you know where to begin, wedding photo editing can be exciting and rewarding. So if it is a perfect wedding, then it is perfect pictures too!

Author Bio: Leah is a blogger and photography enthusiast. She loves writing photography and photo editing blogs at wedding-retouching.com. She is keen in updating herself with advanced photo restoration and enhancement methods. She at present blogs for photo editing service weedit.photos