Reply To: Bring your Rolaids

[nesgran]

To be perfectly honest with you, the shots are not great. The base photos are probably not bad but I’m afraid the editing is mostly pretty dire. There is a vast amount of over smoothing, over contrasting, over saturating and so on. My advice would be to look at all these photos again assuming they are shot raw and you have a clean copy or is using lightroom. Revert all the changes you made to them and add some mild clarity boost, maybe a little saturation or adjust the exposure. If you find that you are bumping any sliders in lightroom to more than 10 be it contrast, clarity, saturation or noise reduction then put them back to 0. If you are having to do that much in post you were probably off the mark by some distance when you took the shot and you have to ask yourself if you really need to do so much life support on your images.

Your edits are not consistent, just look at the difference between the picture of the kid with mum and dad. In one the contrast is so big that the woman’s hair has turned in to black plastic whereas in the other you can tell she is actually a brunette.

As a tip in general, lots of people who want wedding and family photos taken like the brighter “happier” look you’ve got going with the family sitting down. The problem with that shot is that it is blatantly apparent you have been adjusting the exposure a lot. You have large blue haloes around the trees which you get when you dial down exposure. It is not hard to fix in photoshop but it isn’t fun to clone stamp out all that. Second problem is that while mum is sharp, dad isn’t. I would probably have preferred a less hard shadow from baby’s head onto dad. I would also have included more of their bodies, so not cutting off his feet for example.

In summary, keep shooting but stop with the editing as it is ruining your quality. A lot of the shots are nice and would look much better if you don’t try so hard.