My editing is part of my product – photos, it’s part of my photography style. It’s one of the reasons why you hire me.
It takes time to find your style and years to enhance it. My style to photograph and retouch images had been formed by many aspects: the way I see the world, my life values, art education, creative mindset, work and life experience.
All of my packages include professionally retouched pictures. It means that every single picture that you will receive is meticulously checked with special software to make sure that brightness, saturation, color balance, contrast, shadows, highlights are perfectly in harmony to create a fabulous image. And until the moment I deliver you the finest images the order cannot be considered accomplished and cannot be called professional photographs.
I have been retouching pictures for as long as 10 years. So I became good at doing it.
During the average photo session (2 hours) I make around 500-700 pictures, wedding day (6-7 hours) may bring up to 3000 images to retouch (in some cases maybe more). The next photos perfectly illustrates how it sometimes looks.
Would you like to have all these pictures?
Although at first glance they all might seem to look the same, the close up shows that all of them are slightly different. Eyes are closed on one, soft wind blew part of the hair and it covered your face on the other image, head is turned the opposite direction, hand is lifted up or positioned the unappealing way, bird flew in front of the camera, someone was passing by on the background and it is just a part of what could happen to the image. Let’s not forget to mention the artistic part which is conveyed in images through the mood, the glance, smiles, laugh. While on one of pictures everything look perfect and charming the next one can look absolutely different just because something of the above mentioned occurred or is missing. It takes days to select which one of 500 or 700 or 3000 images will be retouched and after that can receive the honor to be called a beautiful photo.
You wish to have beautiful professional pictures as a result of the photo session experience, which includes enjoying the process of the photo session and after admiring the photographs. And in no way it does not include you retouching the pictures, because it is simply the work for the photographer.
Some secrets to be revealed in the following paragraph.
First allow me to ask you one question. Do you remember how usually the beach looks like? Either a public beach or the one at any popular resort. Sometimes crowded, yes? So how to make a photo session in such location? Of course, its better to search for the spot on the beach territory with no people but what if somebody suddenly interferes into the image on the background, just passing by and walking along the beach side? And moreover this exact photo will appear to be very good if not “that guy” on the background. The answer is hidden in the editing process – the photographer’s work. Images speak more for themselves. Here are some examples.
RAW vs JPEG
Simple explanation of these two different formats sounds the following way: JPEG is what you use if you need to get colorful image, and see it on the screen immediately or short after you made it. So in this case there is no need to go through all the process of evaluating how much saturation, contrast or brightness you need to add or to reduce from the image. You see on the screen of the monitor what you have shoot with you camera. Such photos still can be retouched but the result will not be good enough. RAW (unedited/unretouched) is sometimes called digital negative and at first it doesn’t have any color or contrast. And it allows the photographer to do any kind of correction or editing. RAW is the king for every professional photographer in the way that it gives him/her all the information about the scene, where no byte is lost, which makes the process of retouching profound, time-consuming and the end as the trophy you receive the best photos!
As a conclusion, you order a professional photo session for a special occasion, you want to have beautiful, candid, artistic and high quality pictures and my job, as a photographer, to provide it!