By the end of this post I hope to enlighten you about what goes on in the post process of your professional photographer experience. If you hire a photographer to shoot a wedding, or event, and they say they'll have the photos back to you in a matter of days, then they probably don't care a whole lot about post processing. Or, they're up day and night editing them until they're finished. The later seems unlikely. Maybe they're just extremely confident in the way they took the photos. I find that even my best images taken at weddings or events could use some fine-tuning. That's the perfectionist in me, I guess.
To give an example, here's a photo I took at a birthday party a few weeks ago:
At face value, it's a "good" picture. Right off the bat, you might see that it could use some cropping, or maybe that it's a little too dark. The depth of field adds dimension to the photograph that it wouldn't have if every part of the child was in focus. A professional takes photos like the one above to another level when they edit it.
Here's a list of what I did to edit the picture:
1) Correct white balance
2) Crop most of stool out of picture to center the child in the frame
3) Increase brightness
4) Increase saturation
5) Burn the edges of the iris's and dodge the whites of the eyes to make them stand out more
6) Give a fishbowl effect to make the child's hands look further away from his face and add dimension
7) Decrease exposure on the right side where the flash bounced
8) Add vignetting to pull focus inward
9) Increase contrast
10) Lighten highlights
11) Add some fill light
12) Increase the black
Here is the result:
Photography is about transforming "good" photos into "great" photos. I give this level of attention to detail to every photograph that I give back to a client. That means hours of editing to check and perfect the settings, levels, composition, and overall quality of every photo.
There are good photographers, and then there are good editors. I happen to be both. :)
