May 12

I just finished my last edit on my last picture from the church pictures yesterday.  That was a big project, probably took me about 8 hours total to edit them all.  Now that's partly because my photography skills are lacking.  If I were a better photographer who had a better understanding of lighting, I probably wouldn't have to work so hard to edit them all and make them look better.  This was a good learning experience for me, as it was my first attempt at a photo shoot with lights. 

Here's an example of what I did to edit each picture.  This picture was the last one I took, and I was getting lazy.  So the "before" picture was exceptionally bad, as they weren't positioned well in front of the backdrop and the color wasn't right.  Not all  of them were quite this bad straight out of camera. 

Before:

 

After:

 

A little cropping, add a little brightness, add a little more contrast, a little adjusting of the color, add a slight vignette, sharpening, some photoshop to fill in the backdrop in the right corner, then more photoshop to get rid of the glare in their glasses...no wonder it took me eight hours to edit all these pictures!  Thank goodness for digital photography!  I never would have made it as a film photographer.