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Image manipulation with photoshop.
IT is a fun thing to play around with images ! The possibilities are endless. The aim is simply to enhance the portrait, giving it more of an edge, a dreamy feel ! But first, natural light is king and windows are always a real treat for a wedding photographer.
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I am going to try to be concise in this post!
Digital file enhancement is quite an intricate topic that would deserve a more lengthy discussion.
You would commonly process a digital RAW file with bridge or Adobe Lightroom and bring back Colors, range of tones and sharpness in order to optimize the file for printing. This is what a professional wedding photographer would do!
For the Bride, make sure you ask your wedding photographer actually, if he shoots JPG or RAW format. I would say 60% use JPG and those guys, you should keep away from!
For Photographers, as long as you work with a Raw file, you will for sure obtain ( with a bit of training ) some great printing results. Again JPG is just good enough for the web and doesn't have the necessary data to optimize your print quality.
I do like to push the envelope a step further though and play with the images some more. Like a painter with your photoshop brush, you can further enhance each photos to your liking. This is a wonderful way to be creative, tweaking the color a touch more, as well as the saturation to obtain some Blue tones or pastel looking images. You might want to convert to Black and white as well and recreate the grain that we loved so much with film, add a sepia tone, a selenium look to the images or add a texture to give the photo a unique look.
So called artistic image manipulation where each of the images is individually retouched and manipulated to achieve dramatic artist effect.
I used to spend hours in the darkroom working on a print.Photoshop has replaced the chemicals and acids that you used for toning.
Great for your lungs and terrible for your eyes :(
Below are a few sample images that have been custom processed one by one.
Wedding gown designed by Vera Wang
photographe © Olivier Lalin © photographer
view site at Olivier Lalin Weddings
Posted by olivier Lalin -
I shoot with Nikon D2X and Always in Raw format rather then jpg - IT is like having a negative with all of the information that you will be able to play with during "digital printing" to bring the image to Life ! You will be able to tweak The Color, density, contrast and retouch the image if needs be. A raw file is indeed comparable to the latent image contained in an exposed but undeveloped piece of film. It holds exactly what the imaging chip recorded. Nothing more. Nothing less.
This means that the photographer is able to extract the maximum possible image quality, whether now or in the future. A good analogy with the traditional world of film is that you have the opportunity to use a different type of developer or development time at any point in the future if one comes along that you think might do a better job of processing the image.- The latitude of a jpg is narrower and only allow you to do minimum corrections to the image - 
I was at Nikon the other day - A photographer was ahead of me, claiming to the sales man that he believed his high end Nikon camera, that he had just purchased, was faulty-
"... The images are Flat, with no contrast and Unsharp ..." he was saying!
Nikon Policy in advance digital photography is to provide the photographer with a Raw format image that contains the most data the chip can possibly record on Pixels. It is for the Photographer to process his images according to his own specifics. And only last to add sharpness according to the final size of the print. Therefore quite important to make sure that your photographer is "Fluent with Raw format"!
My digital workflow is geared mainly around my work as a wedding photographer.I shoot between 1000 - 2000 images at each wedding in the raw file format. I specifically shoot in the raw format for all the well-known advantages, including a fast workflow. So my digital workflow is aimed at getting the best possible image in a fair amount of time … for a huge amount of photographs.
For photographers - if you already have Photoshop CS2, then you don’t need anything more than Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw for your raw workflow. Photoshop just came out with a new CS3 version which runs great on intel - You might want to consider upgrading too
If you want a comprehensive (and understandable) book on raw workflow :
THis is the bible - Real World Camera Raw with CS2,by Bruce Fraser.
photographe © Olivier Lalin © photographer
view site at weddinglight.com
