What’s the point of post processing wedding photography?
I was asked by a colleague recently if I use Photoshop Actions. An “action”, if you don’t know, is simply a macro of different steps done in Photoshop to manipulate an image a certain way and recorded so that one needn’t repeat all the clicking and navigation everytime you want to do the same thing, but rather simply click the action that’s been recorded to set it all in motion.
What’s happened is that many photographers have put their particular actions for sale on the market as sets and others can purchase them to affect their own photos (I must tell you, however, that actions don’t work on every image, it’s not some magic recipe that guarantees amazing images). You know, they ooh and ahh over that photographers amazing work and think that by applying their actions they’re own work will look as good.
My answer was “no”. That’s the short answer.
I did look into it, for a bit when they started becoming popular, but I stopped. What I’ve seen happen is that they become effects for effect’s sake and/or I’ve seen over-processing of images because of the availability of these action sets. That is to say, I’ve seen many studios where the action used just doesn’t seem warranted by the picture they’ve used it on. Does that make sense? I’ll explain:
One studio, for example, touted the over-saturated purple and reddish sky hues they created in a series of images of a bride and groom, cooing over the colors, but entirely overlooked that they had left garbage cans prominently in the images for all to see (whereas those could’ve been either cropped out or manipulated out. See my post where I did this enhancement of a wedding image ). What’s the point of bumping up the colors if the rest of the picture is what needs work?
Another very popular studio has nothing but over saturated, over processed effects in their images, it seems because it’s faster and easier to batch several hundred photos at a time and click once to affect them all rather than work on each one individually, especially since they’re trying to knock out 800 weddings a year.
I think more in line with how master photography printers used to work in the darkroom: They would size up an image and determine what that image needed to fully bring it to its potential. They would “burn” and “dodge” the print and tweak its hues and blur or sharpen the focus, and vignette it, all to accentuate or minimize parts of the image, and that would really take the photograph to a whole higher level. If you could find a great printer back then, you were consider blessed by the photo deities. The finer photographers would pay these artist-technicians good sums of money to enhance their images in this way.
When entering print competitions, for example, pro photographers would avail themselves of these services in order to have something created that was worthy of winning. One of the things I’ve taken away from these album competitions, for example, is the criteria of having the colors uniform and in a consistent range throughout the book. But yet nowadays, because it’s just a mouse click away from anyone with the program and a finger, it’s not unusual to see all sorts of incongruous images in one album, as if anything goes, it’s an extreme of effects and actions. It’s the photography equivalent to some years back when every videographer (or so it seemed) poured about 100,000 special effects into their videos just because they could: cartoon cupids popping in to shoot arrows, pictures whirling in from one side after another, animated hearts floating around, puzzle pieces assembling themselves rapidly into one large image, etc, etc. You’ve probably seen these and more in your older sister’s wedding video. If you could sit through it long enough…
Truth be told, the point being missed is it’s not about slapping on post process photoshop actions for the effect it has on the image so as to be a novelty; crafting the image in post process should be about determining what treatment each particular image benefits from. It always behooves the graphic artist to, if applying effects, to apply them tastefully, and to limit their use rather than go overboard. It’s the amateur who has the mind set of “if some is good, then more must be better” and goes ahead whether it’s warranted or not.
As a matter of fact, the moment the processing becomes the star rather than the image, being more noticeable than subtle, you’ve got yourself a picture that someday will look very dated. Trends will come and go, but “classic” lasts forever.
For example, consider this straight-out-of-camera image of a bride with her dad in the car before the ceremony:
It needs some work, but what shall that work consist of?
It’s easy enough to run it through a few actions, change some colors, add some effect and, voilá! Like these for example:
But whatever was done in those variations, it had nothing to do with that image.
What I mean by that is, this image is calling, indeed shouting, for the bride and her dad to be isolated in the picture, to draw the viewer’s eye to them, because there’s a story going on in that picture and that’s exactly where we find it.
There’s an interaction happening between them at that moment in time and it constitutes the inherent drama in this particular image. That the sister and mother are looking on is gravy, as it adds more dimension to the photo, both in its story and its appearance, making it even richer, yet they join us, the viewer, in watching the scene unfold.
That’s how I think about this photo.
It’s this story that’s the most important feature of all in the image, and no amount of special effects is going to enhance that aspect. But it sure can take away and even distract from it.
So the question becomes, what can we do in post process to bring this story out?
Well, the answer is not in running your pictures through an assembly line of canned photoshop actions, but to use photoshop tools for what they were meant for, and that is, to craft out the final image. Take it to another level. Doing that, we obtain a much more dramatic, story telling image:
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