Wedding Photography Tips
Welcome to this Wedding Photography Quick Tips section of the Blog where we’ll aim to give a nice and simple easy ‘fix’ or technique tip for Wedding Photographers when capturing a Wedding Day.
Wedding Photographers are as a whole professional photographers who are both adept at capturing your Wedding perfectly but they are also photoshop gurus that will carefully post-process every single one of your Wedding Photographs. What i’m seeing on some Wedding Blogs that I follow is a very simple mistake being made by Wedding Photographers which is ‘blowing the highlights‘ of the Brides dress.
The term ‘blowing the highlights’ is used to describe when all the detail in the highlights part of an image is lost due to overexposure (or poor post-processing). I hear time and time again from Brides about how important it is to show the details of the dress (which is why we often capture an image such as the one to the right of this text to show the work and beauty of the dress).
examples to the left and right of this text show ‘false-overexposure’ applied to demonstrate bringing the detail back to the dress.
I feel it is a shame when an image looks compositionally beautiful, the expression is great but somewhere along the line the detail is lost in the dress. Here’s a quick tip on how to fix this either in camera (best option) or in post-processing.
1 – In-Camera – If you’re capturing an image of the bride on her own then when the camera sees a white dress it panics. It basically sees this as far too bright and tries to underexpose the image. What it seems some photographers are doing is over compensating for this and possibly looking at just the exposure on the bride & grooms faces. These are crucial to get exposed correctly don’t get me wrong but make sure you look at the entire images exposure before being happy with it.
2 – Post-Processing – If you’re running the latest version of Photoshop which is Photoshop CC then you’ll have a fantastic option which you can use, even if you don’t shoot RAW (if you don’t then you should ideally as RAW format captures much more detail than a JPEG image) you will have an option in the Filter menu Filter > Camera Raw Filter. Here an overexposed dress can usually be fixed with a quick change in the Highlights, simply drag the slider for this option to the left and watch the detail return to the dress. If it’s now a little too dark overall you can change the other settings to compensate or try applying a little ‘Dodge’ to the dark areas.
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