The Difference Between Proof and Final

I'm in the process of preparing Sarah and Justin's full blog post, but it's going to be a couple more days, so in the meantime I thought I would take the opportunity to show off a couple more final image previews and compare them to their proof image counterparts.

In this first set of images the final version of the image is on top. The aspect of this image that really caught my eye was the shape of Sarah's dress as she holds it up. As soon as I saw that shape, I knew this was going to be brought to the final image stage.

In the final version, you'll notice I cropped in a bit closer to Sarah and Justin to get them a little more centered in the frame and to cut out some unnecessary information. You'll also notice I removed the distracting sign on Sarah's right. Finally, I changed the toning a bit to give the image a more unique feel, and blurred the edges a little to draw the eye towards Sarah and Justin and to give the image a more aged, imperfect feel.

Images which use full sun as back-lighting can offer a very distinctive look, but they are also a bit of a craps shoot. You never know exactly what kind of flare and aberrations you'll get when you let the sun straight into your lens. I love it.

Obviously, the final version of this image was converted to black and white. I tried to make it work in color for a while, but finally decided it just looked better - more subtle - in black and white. Again, I cropped in closer to Sarah and Justin to remove the distracting and modern street details, and I added a tilt/shift lens effect to add visual interest and draw the eye to our couple. I also thought the extra blur again added a vintage feeling to the image.