Before and After…

Just a few days ago a had a guest from my last wedding calling me and ordering a 16×24 print of her daughter. I would like to show you what I do with your images after you place your order. You can see image on the left before any retouching, it is straight from the camera image (pretty good, huh?) and image on the right after I spent some time working on it. I do that with every image you order for print. It doesn’t make much sense to  order 4×6 since you won’t be able to see much details. This order was for a large print and on prints of 16×24 size you will be able to see every little detail on the face and eyes and if there are some issues they need to be fixed. This image was perfectly exposed in good light, with a proper white balance from the very beginning and I didn’t have to do much work to color correct it, but that is not in every case. So, here is the list of what was done:

- skin cleaning. This girl had very little skin problems because she is very young. So I just cleaned a few little blemishes and soften skin. Usually, it requires more work to clean the skin. By the way, my brides always have perfect skin, so just add some more glamour.

- skin tone improvement. Improved overall skin tone. It looks subtle but little things here and there make a big difference.

- removed some hair on her forehead. You can’t see much of it on this reduced picture, but trust me on full size print there was some loose hair visible.

- removed hair from her shoulder and straighten some hair on her head above the flower.

- enhanced eyes. Cleaned eyes whites, made eyes brighter, which brought their natural color.

- brighten the flower to bring some details on it.

- added some image clarity and contrast.

- added vignetting around the picture to bring more attention to the face.

- enlarged it to 16×24 size using special software which allows to keep much more details then regular methods.

- sharpened the image.

So, these are the steps I performed on this image and I didn’t even do any art work here. That would a different topic next time.

Have a nice day!

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