Hi Friends and happy Sunday! I hope you all are having a wonderful long weekend. For today's blog post, I'm doing it on a question that I get asked quite frequently - which is what do my photos look like when I take them and how much editing do I do to them? While the answer is "it varies", it's truly based on how much I have to do to an image to get it looking like the vision I have in my mind. As an Orange County Family and Child photographer, my favorite part of a session is actually the editing process! That's when I take a raw photo that is ho-hum and make it magical! While I don't normally show the straight out of camera (SOOC) images because they don't represent my finished work that I deliver to clients, I get asked about it so much I thought I'd share a few typical before and after’s with you.
My editing process begins with what’s called culling, or sorting through my images. This is where I go through every since image I take during a session, and delete the duplicates, the ones where eyes are closed/half blinking, any funny expressions etc. From there, I correct color, exposure, and straighten the images in Adobe Lightroom. From there, I take every single image I deliver and hand edit it in Photoshop, which is where the magic happens! So many people wonder why hiring a photographer is more expensive than they thought. The reason is that editing images, espeically those edited by hand is icredibly time consuming! You are paying your photographer to make magic, both during and after your session :-).
Image 1 Before and After: While there is nothing wrong with the image (it has the correct exposure, color toning, and composition) it lacks warmth, magic, and pop!