Do You Know What Photo Retouching Is?

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Ashley and Sam Brockinton, an amazing husband and wife photography team. They were incredibly knowledgeable and helpful, among many other things. Words cannot explain how truly amazing they are and how much I appreciated my "learning/brainstorming session" with them.

Sam and Ashley explained things to me about photography that I had never even thought about. A little too often, I found myself thinking, "Wow, I wish I had known this when I was looking for a photographer!" I wanted to share some of this valuable information with you all so you can be more informed and knowledgeable when looking for your wedding photographer!

Ashley and Sam want others to be informed about photography as well, and they are always posting helpful information about wedding photography on their blog. The following is a post from Ashley and Sam's blog about Photo Retouching. Take a look at the video as well!

Retouching-what does it mean from ashley brockinton on Vimeo.

There are a lot of terms that get thrown around in our industry: many of them have completely different meanings to different photographers. Some of those terms include: second photographer, lighting assistant, photo re-touching, book/album, coffee table book and rights. Today, we want to look at photo re-touching.

For us photo re-touching is a three step process that takes about 10-30 minutes or more per image.

Step 1 - Basic lighting adjustments - color correction (white is white, skin tones are natural), cropping, overall exposure and highlight recovery (technical term meaning that with digital the whites sometimes get so white that you can't see any detail - this brings back that detail)

Step 2- We make you look great - skin re-touching is done here. We also clean up any dirt or distracting areas in the photo that just take away from the overall feel.

Step 3 - Image is stylized. Now we add the feel to the image - editorial, vintage, black and white, high contrast, etc. Now, it's a piece of art - ready for the album, blog, website or your wall - either Facebook or your home ;-)

One thing we find terribly important is CONSISTENCY. Ask your potential photographer to see their last few weddings, a whole wedding that they recently shot AND check out their blog. Beware of several things:

1. Really touched up, great images on the website and average images on the blog.

2. Website pics from workshops. We should all be pushing ourselves professionally but one of my pet peeves is when photogs post on their website pictures from a workshop because someone else arranged most of the variables - location, model, hair, makeup, lighting and maybe more. Look for images that don't look like they're from the area and just ask where they photographed; I encourage everyone to share these images but my personal feeling is that these should be put on blogs telling about how the workshop was and where it was, etc.

3. Is that your work or their work? If you are looking into a studio that has multiple shooters and shoots multiple weddings, make sure you get to see the portfolio of the person who is shooting your wedding. Who does the re-touching; will they look like the albums you saw and the web galleries?

3. Online Galleries - they're almost always password protected. We have the ability to hide our sites as well as password protect, BUT we choose NOT to unless asked because we want prospective brides to view the real deal; that's exactly what we delivered last week, last month, last year, etc. If that's what you want, we can do that or better. Nearly all the weddings we've shot in the last 2 years are available or were available (they might have expired) online at www.ashleybrockintonclients.com - engagement sessions too! These galleries contain un-retouched proof images so you can see our consistency IN camera. To view consitency with our finished product check out our blogged weddings.

One last note: Professional printing makes a HUGE difference. Our monitors are callibrated to our pro lab. The colors and the consistency are awesome! This is so important because many clients are now receiving digital files and printing on their own. Every printer is different. Printing a digital negative file that has been fully re-touched and stylized on a drug-store printer is like buying the sports car of your dreams and never leaving the 35 mph roads in the suburbs. Wow great car, but if you really want to enjoy it you've gotta get on the open road.

Ashley Brockinton Photography

A Hip and Chic Photography Boutique

Specializing in Wedding and Engagement Photography/Portraits for the Fashionista in LOVE!

Location: Bonita Springs, FL

Servicing SW Florida and Beyond

The raw and retouched images compared to each other is amazing to see! I never had any clue about the extent of what can be done with a photograph.

A huge THANK YOU to Ashley and Sam Brockinton for sharing this information with us! Be sure to check out more of their exquisite work on their phlog! And you just HAVE to watch their "Meet the Brockintons" video! It's the cutest thing ever!

I hope this post leaves you more informed about what goes into photography. If you have any other questions or topics you would like covered, let me know!