Wedding Photo Editing Tips

As you probably already know editing photos is one of the tasks that come with the job of a wedding photographer. Understanding how to edit wedding photos, knowing all Photoshop brushes or tools can be a time-consuming and overwhelming part of your wedding photography workflow. Benefit from the following 20 wedding photo editing tips, which will completely change your photo retouching, and make it simple and fast.

20 Wedding Photo Editing Tips for Beginning Photo Retoucher

1. Choose a Wedding Photo Editing Software

For editing wedding photos (cropping, color correction) use Adobe Lightroom CC, for wedding photo retouching/photo manipulations (skin retouching, stray hair removal, body reshaping, background enhancement, adding effects) use Adobe Photoshop CC. Get the Creative Cloud Photography plan starting at just US$9.99/mo. (all-new Lightroom CC, 20 GB of cloud storage, Lightroom Classic CC, and Photoshop CC).

2. Make Your Photo Culling Fast

First, select the photos you want to edit. It’s highly recommended to use the Flag tool. When selecting an image, you click on the P on the keyboard (P for Pick). So you add a flag, or you can click on the checkbox in the thumbnail image. You can also use Face recognition feature in Lightroom to sort wedding photos into categories as Bride, Groom, Couple, Family, Friends, Macro, Ceremony, Party, and Lifestyle.

Having thousands of wedding photos, you are not going to retouch all of them in Photoshop – it will take about 1 year to complete. To make a basic skin retouching (remove acne, birthmarks, scars, and other defects) and remove small objects from the background, use a Healing Brush tool in Lightroom.

4. Download or Create LR Presets/ PS actions

It is one of the best ways for a fast color correction in Lightroom and Photoshop. In the web, there are a massive number of paid and free Lightroom Presets wedding and free Photoshop actions wedding. Use them to add an elegant pastel, soft black and white or trendy matte effect on your wedding pictures. All plugins are customizable and suit to all Lightroom/Photoshop versions. If you do not like some color/tints/shadows indicators, you can change them. This helps get a specific style of images that will be tracked on all the photos.

5. Correct Contrast Settings

Fixing contrast is as important as adjusting white balance in your wedding shots. Making the perfect balance of highlights and shadows can be long and boring to beginners who are not qualified in working with Lightroom or Photoshop. Lightroom presets makes photo editing very easy by automating the actions of color correction. Forget about pulling sliders over each one.

If you want to change the lighting, first make light on the photo neutral. Go to Select – Color Range and select Highlights. Duplicate the selected area to the new layer of the CTRL + J command. Return to the background layer and through the Color Range, select the Shadows. Duplicate the selection on a separate layer (CTRL + J) and change the blending mode of the layers with the shadows to Multiply. Reduce the opacity to about 30%, depending on the image. Create a new layer, fill it with a neutral gray color and change the blending mode to Overlay. We start to correct the light / shadow with the tools Dodge and Burn (O). Or you can create a new layer, change its blending mode to Soft Light or Overlay and draw with black and white colors in the required areas with a low opacity brush.

6. Prepare Shortcuts for Making Wedding Photography Workflow Fast

Shortcuts affect the speed and quality of your work that is matters while editing wedding photos. Use these Photoshop keyboard shortcuts that significantly speeds up your image retouching.

7. Use a Dehaze tool

It is complicated to guess what the weather will be during the wedding photoshoot. But thanks to Dehaze tool, you can adjust the haziness and eliminate defects with lighting. This function adds full tones and creates clear lines of all objects in the image.

8. Make a Quick Noise Retouching

Fast wedding photography editing techniques include a reducing noise tool. Digital noise is the result of poor lighting or a bad lens. First, adjust the color noise. If the light is distorted and grains are too visible, change the luminance noise. Therefore, initially save pictures in RAW form.

9. Apply a Blurring Effect to Portraits

This effect is used when you need to select an item on the image or to remove focus from unwanted objects. The function is also suitable for photos without focus balance. You can control the amount of blur, depending on the purpose of using this function. Set the sharpness to -100 for blurred backgrounds, and -50 for creating a slightly blurred backdrop.

10. Make Photos Black and White

For making a dramatic look or emphasize the feeling shown on the photo – make photos monochrome. Such a conversion will improve the quality of the picture, especially if it was made in poor light. In Lightroom to speed up the process, create a preset and use it for several images at once. In Photoshop, go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Black & White.

11. Make a Hollywood Smile

Remove yellow shades but keep a natural look. To whiten teeth quickly, you can apply the mask function to the entire image. Do not use it unless there is a clear line of teeth. In this case, select the correct brush size and edit the image manually.

12. Batch Image Editing

After a long day of the wedding photoshoot, you come home to edit hundreds of photographs, which can last hours away from your wedding photography workflow. Now think about weddings you shoot during the year. Editing every wedding photos sounds crazy, doesn’t’ it? Batch editing will help reduce time spend on it. Mind that outsourcing editing to wedding photo editing services, like Wedding-retouching will not only save your time overall but keep one photographic style.

13. Make Cropping

Before cropping wedding images in Lightroom mind the Rule of Thirds, level a photo, dim the screen to have a clear view of how the wedding portrait will look once it’s cropped, zoom out to understand how the photo will look on a smaller scale.

14. Correct Lighting

Sometimes outdoor pictures are made flawlessly and almost do not need photo retouching, but they lack the tenderness and romance colors. Try to apply various effects, for example, Cross Process 2 or use the function Beautify. Just make two movements, and photo editing will be completed.

15. Use the Clone Stamp Set

If your bridal portraits have small face blemishes, apply the Spot Removal tool in LR or the Clone Stamp/Healing Brush in PS. By means of them you can remove small objects, make stray hair invisible, smooth small skin blemishes, and remove background distracting spots, fix clothing wrinkles or dust.

16. Use Frequency Separation for Smoothing Skin

This quick editing method can be used not only for the face but also for clothing, sky, and background. It is a multifunctional tool for work.

17. Add Bokeh

Use this tool for the wedding photos taken at night. Bokeh helps focus attention on details, objects, and a couple. Open Lightroom, in the Develop Module, adjust exposure and coloring. Choose the Pen Tool, set the Exposure to about +3.0, the Flow to about 80 and the Flow to 15. Use brushes of different sizes and colors.

18. Add the Watermark Fast

If you have the desire and permission from the couple to post pictures from the wedding photo session at the website or in social networks, you’d better add a watermark/photography logo. It’s doing very quickly and simply. Create a new layer by selecting Layer > New > Layer, name it “Watermark”, and click OK.

19. Make Export Fast

Each photographer independently chooses how to deliver pictures to the customer. Now many couples order an electronic version of all images and then several printed ones. Create separate folders for each event, for example, “Ceremony”, “Banquet”, “Preparation”. Export with such parameters: 88 Quality, 2500 pixels long edge, 300 dots per inch. Now select the file-sharing site that you use and upload the images. Your customer must create a zip file to upload their pictures, so you save time on delivering the order to the customer.

20. Outsource Photo Editing

You can edit the images on your own or address online wedding photo retouching services like FixThePhoto or WeEdit.photos.

 

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