Do wedding photographers edit all photos? | Boston Wedding Photography

Not every image is worth delivering to the client and a big part of wedding photography is curating and polishing images that the client will love - Image Courtesy.

Do wedding photographers edit and deliver all of the photos from a wedding?

In the early point of digital wedding photography it was common for some photographers to finish a wedding and upload everything onto a disc. Today that approach is a lot less common, with most photographers preferring to curate and polish their galleries - this means that there will be photos that get left on the cutting room floor.

Personally I have three stages of working with photographs from a shoot: culling, correcting, and retouching.

Culling (or editing) is the first stage where every photo from your Boston wedding gets uploaded into the system, tagged, and backed up. From that point I start to make selections to separate the great and good photos from the technical errors, unhappy accidents, and redundant shots (very common with portraits where you have a lot of small variations on composition, framing, and posing). I will probably shoot thousands of frames on a wedding day but usually only around a quarter of that gets delivered.

The selections move onto the correction phase. This is where we make any tweaks to the automatic adjustments to white balance and exposure and then start to make manual adjustments so that the colors and light look right. Here we’ll also make small adjustments to the crop of images to straighten them out when things are unintentionally listing to one side or another. At this stage we’ll usually add a modified color preset to give images a more finished look and everything is ready for delivery.

Retouching is a step beyond and is what most people think of when they imagine photo editing. Here’s where we open up Photoshop to hide all the little flaws and imperfections that creep into an image - where you get rid of that errant EXIT sign in the beautiful shot of the reception or fix the groom’s shirt tail that came untucked during a dance. THis is usually something that happens for highlights that will be posted for social media galleries or images that are ordered for print by the couple.

Do you have any other questions about the editing process? Do you want to know what happens behind the scenes of your wedding? Let us know in the comments and if you’re looking to book your Boston wedding photographer then get in touch with Ryan Richardson Photography today.

Ryan Richardson is a wedding and engagement photographer serving Boston and beyond; including Cape Cod Weddings, New England Weddings, Massachusetts Weddings and Rhode Island Weddings.