This is another view-from-my-office photo.
A large portion of my photo retouching is fixing and polishing business headshots so the person looks their best. I’ve done some commercial retouching where the work was more technical than creative. For examples: placing images onto TV screens and computer displays, changing a company’s logo in its marketing photos, and adding drop shadows to various products. I also retouch photos of completed house renovations.
Retouching wedding photos is another type of work I do. I don’t retouch every photo from a wedding simply because it would be too expensive to retouch many dozens of images. Usually the bride selects her most important photos to be retouched, often just a handful or two.
Over the past few months, I’ve retouched photos from three weddings:
Two of these weddings seemingly used either a cheap photographer or an amateur. It was easy to tell because the photos were low quality. The photos had poor compositions, uneven exposures, bad backgrounds, bad flash, etc. These pictures required a lot of fixing although I couldn’t fix everything. Some photos were just too poorly done.
The third wedding obviously used a pro wedding photographer. These photos were excellent. Retouching was used mostly to remove background distractions because the photos were shot in a public park and on a public street. These pictures didn’t really need fixing, they just needed some polishing.
A common retouching request is to remove someone from a wedding photo. It might be a relative that the bride or groom don’t like or it’s an odd looking or annoying guest. One retouch request was to remove a female wedding guest who was wearing a bright pink, flowered pantsuit and was standing close to the bride. Another request was to remove a female guest who wore, what could be best described as, a toga. Of course, there’s almost always a drunk guy in the background who needs to be retouched away.
Public Service Announcement
When it comes to wedding photographers, you really get what you pay for. I’ve read that, in Canada, the average price paid for wedding photography is $3,000 to $5,000. If you pay much less than this, expect to be disappointed or plan to pay a lot of money for retouching.
Good wedding photographers put in a lot of work. Charging many thousands of dollars is easily justified and it shows in their final photos. When I retouch photos, I can easily tell which photographers know their craft and which don’t. I can see which photos were properly executed and which weren’t.
Here’s a thought: how much are you planning to spend on flowers for your wedding? Those flowers are going to be used for one day. By comparison, how long are you planning to use your wedding photos? How important are those images to you and your descendants? Investing in good photography should be an easy decision. Wedding photos are the only lasting record of your special day, other than perhaps your wedding rings. Photos are the only thing that will bring back wedding memories.
If you want good wedding pictures, hire a photographer who shoots weddings all the time. Part-timers and photographers who dabble in wedding photography don’t compare to full-time specialists.
If you don’t use a wedding photography specialist, you may need to budget hundreds or even thousands of dollars to hire someone like me to fix your wedding pictures. Even then, there’s no guarantee your photos will be fixable.
