UNEDITED, EDITED, AND RETOUCHED
Have you ever heard the terms “Unedited, Edited, and Retouched” when referring to wedding images? In this post I’m going to show you exactly what that means with examples of each. At the bottom is a slideshow to show the difference in the three photos.
This first photo of a bride getting ready is unedited. What that means is that it is “straight out of camera” or SOOC. When people will ask for images on a USB or a disc, this is usually what they get. While there is not really anything “wrong” with this photo (I actually like it a lot) it doesn’t “pop” like a photo should, in my opinion.
Here, in this next photo, you can see the difference in what it means to do what’s known as a “batch edit”. This is when you get all of the images that you want to keep (discarding all of the ones that are not “good or great”) and run a program to get them looking sharper, cleaner, more in focus, and better saturated. This is the type of photo I generally give to clients on the USB drive that comes with the wedding packages we offer. You can tell, these are good pictures, however not “award winning” or “stunning” pictures.
Finally, in this last photo, you can see the finished product. This would go into an album, be printed-sometimes large, and shared online. What is different? This photo took about 10 minutes to retouch. In the world of self employment, 10 minutes is a lot of time, energy, and money. The colors have been tuned, there are blemishes taken out, distractions from the background removed, saturation and color have been toned up or down, and the overall tones of the image have been moved around.
While it may not look like a lot, it really means a lot to keep images congruent with each other when you are putting an album together. In the world of photography, a lot of people will send their images away to a photo editing company to do all of this for them. While I’m not judging that process in any way, I want to have my creative “hand” in a photo from start to finish and be in charge of the outcome completely. I feel as though this is what you’ve paid me for, my creative vision. All of the pictures you see anywhere on my site (anywhere!) are mine, even the logos and watermarks. I’m pretty particular about it.
Starting this summer we will be offering our photos to you with our packages on a USB that are “Edited”. If you’d like to purchase the fully “Retouched” images, there will be a significant charge because the time and editing that goes into each photo is worth it. Don’t worry, the pictures that go into an album are the retouched ones. That won’t change. Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks for visiting and have a great week!
Please follow along on Instagram!
[instagram-feed]
