Digital Wedding Photography For Dummies

Editing and Adjusting Your Photos

After you sort through and organize all your images from a wedding, you’re finally ready to start polishing your pictures. In the following sections, I outline some basic editing techniques, such as adjusting white balance and tone, boosting color, and cropping and straightening an image. (Note: I always do my first round of editing right in Lightroom, so I focus on that program in the following sections. If you happen to use other editing software, keep in mind that all — or most — of the functions I talk about here can be found in other similar programs.)

After my first edits are done, if I feel that a few select pictures need a little more fine-tuning, I do my second edits within Photoshop, which I cover in Chapter 13. However, most of the time the pictures that I edit in Photoshop are only the images that will be used in a wedding album, for print, or for a post on my blog, so most of my editing happens right within Lightroom (because fine-tuning all 800 pictures from a wedding in Photoshop would take forever).

Correcting white balance

If you’re new to photo editing, you may not know where to start on any particular photo. I recommend starting with white balance, which allows you to adjust the overall color of your image. The goal of adjusting white balance is to get your photo to look the way your own eyes saw the scene. Though DSLRs today ...