Wedding Photography Gallery - Image 12

Here is one of those mistakes, lack of time/professionalism or "momentary lapse of reason" moments that I said I would also tell you about.

The reason I am showing this image is for more what I did post-processing rather than during the shoot. We were running out of time as the couple were about to eat so we found a reasonably nice setting in the reception venue for some time out shots but the area was extremely cluttered.

No time to set up a tripod or change camera settings. No time to fanny about with studio lights, white balance or manual settings. I simply set a reasonable ISO, aperture priority, bounced the flash and took a bunch of wonky shots.

The first thing I did was to straighten and crop the image to a square, medium format style shape to match the surroundings. Why crop before working on the image? I do that so that when I make changes to white balance and exposure etc, I am doing it for just the areas I want in the final image, and not taking measurements from bits I will discard anyway.

What I also did was to clone out part of a chair, adjust the white balance (which is a cinch using RAW images...you DO shoot RAW don't you?), levels, curves etc, and generally cleaned up the shot.

I have also cloned in (for the purpose of this tutorial, not for the client), a nice roaring fire in the background. Just go to a good, cheap microstock agency like Shutterstock, buy a suitable image for a dollar or so and use it to clone or paste in. Or use one of your own stock images.

Oh, go on then...here is the original RAW image just to make a point of how bad I was. Learn from this and take your time but if that just isn't possible, learn how to deal with it later. Finally, no! I am not a "shoot now and fix later" kind of photographer, although if it works for you...! I like to get it right at the time of shooting to save time on messing about like this later on.

Lens 24-70 2.8 L at 30mm

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