Touched by an Airbrush: Boston Wedding Photography Retouching

It's engagement season in Boston, and as a New England wedding photographer that means it's time to field a lot of questions from clients looking to know who we are and what we do. Yesterday, we got one really great question by e-mail and I ran quickly down the rabbit hole.

I am interested in the digital basic package, but could not find what the additional charge would be for retouching on the digital images. What might that cost be?

- Courtney P.

it's 2013, so almost all of our packages include a "digital proof set." This is the curated collection of your wedding day images (minus all the technical errors and duplicates) that have been corrected for white balance, tone and crop.

After that it gets a little complicated.

If you want to change one picture to something black and white, then it's nothing. But if Gretchen (a fictional bridesmaid) is a total mess at the wedding and you want to erase her from history, that's probably going to be a number that makes you think Gretchen isn't such a terrible person after all.

Normally with most of our packages we'll produce an edited highlight gallery for Facebook and our blog, We're aiming to show about 150 to 200 images per event and we deliver those back to the client as part of their download or disc.

For the most part, these are quick edits to clean up exposure and bring back dimension to the color (or make it stand out with black and white). Sometimes we'll remove a few blemishes or intrusive details (exit signs, nearly naked man wandering by on the beach). For example, in our Facebook cover shot we covered up all the wording on the side of the bus because it was distracting (and super easy to get rid of).

Getting a few more images cleaned up isn't a big deal. Or even just one image that you want to have the full treatment.

It scales up from there depending on what the client wants but typically we do most of our retouching for print and album orders, which is already reflected in those prices.

The workflow is slightly different for portrait sessions (especially boudoir), where we're usually showing the client far fewer images that are much more polished.