Sunday, July 25, 2010

Proof and Final Image Comparison

I just finished blogging Heather and John's wedding photos the other day, but I thought I would take a moment to revisit one of them because it's a great example of the potential difference between proof and final images.
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The color image on the left is the proof image. It isn't straight out of the camera. It's been adjusted a little bit for contrast, but it's pretty close to the original frame. The image on the right is the final image. It was part of a series of black and white images so obviously there isn't going to be any special color treatment applied to this image other than the black and white conversion.

After the lack of color, the first difference you'll probably notice between two images is that I removed the microphone in the final (right) image. To be honest, I almost didn't remove it. It isn't horribly distracting and removing it takes this photo out of the realm of photojournalism and into a more "artistic" version of reality. I decided that in this case, I was fine with not being completely accurate to reality for the sake of a cleaner image that better fit my vision. With other frames I may not have made the same artistic choice.

The difference between these two photos that is harder to notice is the removal of a little bit of sweat from the bride's face. This day was incredibly hot and at this point the bride and groom had been standing in direct sunlight for about 30 minutes. Understandably, there is going to be some wetness on the face. So in the final version, I cleaned it up a little bit. Again, to fit with my vision for what this photo should be.

Finally, when shooting in direct sunlight like this, you're going to have a huge amount of contrast between what is in the sun and what is not. You'll notice that in the final version I lightened the darker areas around the bride's face so we could better see her loving expression.

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