On a rare occasion photos straight from the camera may be perfect just as you might find a flawless perfectly shaped diamond in nature. But leaving perfection to chance is a very risky business, particularly in wedding photography where wedding couples and their families aren't interested in the pursuit of natural perfection but memories of an extraordinary day.
So how to enhance images? Using the following four images that came from a recent wedding I photographed in Sydney, there is no simple rule that you can slavishly follow, more a set of rules that I am slowly working out.
Rule 1
Eliminate clutter
This photo of the bride was taken in a hotel room which had average light, a lot of clutter and little time for posing the bride.
In order to accentuate what I considered important, namely the dress, the bride and her maid of honour, I had to eliminate the lady in the background, the luggage on the right side, the air-conditioning duct, the small table in the background and the mirror. I've also toned the image to make it warmer, cropped it to vertically in order to emphasise the bride's slim figure and blurred the bed and background to draw attention to the bride's dress.
Rule 2
Tone images after considering what makes them significant
This photo has enormous significance - the father is about to give away his daughter but the surrounds were less than ideal, a corridor from a lift.
To draw attention to the bride, I made the floor dark to accentuate her dress. This follows the rule that the eye is drawn to the lightest part of the image so if it is irrelevant, make it darker. Similarly, I made the walls and ceiling darker and removed the halogen lights in the ceiling.
To draw attention to the bride, I made the floor dark to accentuate her dress. This follows the rule that the eye is drawn to the lightest part of the image so if it is irrelevant, make it darker. Similarly, I made the walls and ceiling darker and removed the halogen lights in the ceiling.
Without waxing lyrical too much, now that the bride is a vision of light in darkness, and is being lead from that darkness into the light, the image's tones are consistent with its theme.
Rule 3
Eliminate colour to compel the viewer to look deeper
Black and white photos tend to be more powerful than colour photos when conveying mood because they require additional analysis. I am not sure what the science is, but when we look at a typical image, we scan it for information, allowing perhaps half a second to absorb as much as we can. When there is little information about colour in the photo, we may devote the time we would have spent absorbing information about the image's colour to other elements of the image to learn about it.
For me this image is all about tenderness and to 'force' the viewer to appreciate this, I converted the colour image into a two toned image. I did not use black and white as these colours would have been too stark and would have jarred with the tender mode of this image. Instead, I chose a rich golden white and a golden black.
Rule 4
Find out what your client likes
If you consider your images without considering your client's preferences it will be that much harder to know how to enhance images. In this wedding, the bride loved sandstone so we looked for a colonial building to use as a backdrop, took some shots and then headed back to the reception.
When I saw the couple hand in hand, walking back, I realised I had a terrific image - not only did I have sandstone as a backdrop but I could crop the photo so it looked like they were heading to a doorway and not an awaiting cab. I also had a lovely image of the couple.
But how to tone it? Bearing in mind the bride loves sandstone, it made sense to tone the image in 'sandstone' colours - an added benefit is that the bride's skin now glows with health.
