Brother’s Engagement Photographs
My brother is getting married in October. He and his bride-to-be recently had engagement photographs taken. The photographer was an amateur trying to build a portfolio so he could turn professional as far as I know. He meant well, no doubt about it. The set of processed photographs he gave them were way over stylized in Photoshop, though. After they expressed disappointment, he agreed to give them the originals (he shot in jpg) so they could have me take a stab at it. The main problems were deep shadows, trees/poles growing out of heads, horizons not straight, and even a finger in several of them. That being said, this photographer did have some great ideas for shooting locations and composition. He definitely has the eye for this work. I’m not going to show before and after, but here’s a list of the things I worked on: Composition, color, tonal balance, white balance, finger removal, skin softening, and one bird replacement.
I used mostly Lightroom but some Photoshop. Having started from scratch three times, my skill with the Develop module (for portraits in particular) has increased dramatically. It also gave me some experience with the Web module. The biggest roadblock to finishing this project was knowing when to give up on an unusable image. There were several that had serious problems even though the idea behind them was good. Out of 589 I felt that only 34 were usable for my taste.
To see the final images click on the screenshot above. After clicking inside the page you can use the right or left arrow keys to navigate. Once again, these are not my photographs. I just did the post-processing. Please leave your feedback.
UPDATE: I’ve now seen these on several monitors and the only one that looks correct is my color calibrated one. They look either over- or under-saturated on others. I’m not surprised, just disappointed that the only way to view them accurately is to print them or see them on my monitor. The world should have their monitors color calibrated immediately. Yes, that means you.
