retouching

Professional retouching can significantly improve wedding photos by correcting technical issues, enhancing skin appearance, and adding artistic effects, all while preserving the natural beauty of the moment.

Correct Technical Issues

Wedding photographers often work quickly and with limited equipment. They don’t always have control over the lighting in venues like churches, hotel ballrooms or parks. As a result, uneven or unpredictable lighting can affect the quality of the images. Photo editing and retouching help correct these lighting issues, ensuring the final photos are visually balanced.

Most wedding photographers do some basic editing before delivering the photos. But few perform detailed retouching. This is usually because it’s time-consuming, not cost-effective, or simply outside their skill set.
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Deciding whether or not to retouch your family portraits follows a similar thought process as for individual portraits. But there are a few added considerations since a family portrait is usually a group photo. Here are a few things to consider:

Purpose of the Portrait

If your family portrait is for something formal like a holiday card, a website, or a living room wall, a little retouching can help enhance the image while maintaining a natural look. Common adjustments might include softening harsh lighting, evening out skin tones, or removing temporary blemishes.

For a family portrait that’s for personal use, retouching isn’t usually necessary. A family photo is more about the moment captured than perfection.
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Around 2008, a photographer-friend, who owned a portrait studio, started getting customers who wanted dating profile portraits. Cellphone cameras were becoming popular back then, but many people wanted higher quality photos with better lighting. Shooting online dating photos became a popular service at his studio.

When he closed his studio at the end of 2019, he had said that the demand for shooting dating photos had dropped to zero. My friend speculated that, because cellphone cameras had become so much better, most people were using cellphone photos for their dating profiles.

Yesterday I retouched two cellphone selfies for someone who said the images were for her dating profile. The image quality was pretty good because she used a recent cellphone. But there were problems.
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A recent Spanish study, published November 2024, confirmed once again that people whose portraits are perceived as attractive are also seen as more intelligent and trustworthy.

The study used 462 pairs of portraits, each showing a person before and after a beauty filter was applied. The photos were rated by 2,748 participants, aged 18 to 88, with an equal number of males and females from the UK, US, and Canada. The participants were shown random subsets of the portraits, but never both versions of the same photo.

The results were clear: portraits with the beauty filter consistently received higher ratings for traits like intelligence, trustworthiness, and sociability.
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