Wedding B&Ws? (4 images)

[Andy M]

For me, wedding B&Ws vary from 'normal' B&W shots in that I feel they should make the subjects look as angelic as possible

I've been having a play with some of the shots from my own wedding, and am wondering if the shots are too light/too dark/too contrasty/ ... etc etc?

Is anybody able to give me any pointers?

[Jonathan Wienke]

Overall, pretty good; the only nit I'd pick is that you hav a lot of blown highlights in all of them.

[Andy M]

Hi Jonathan,

I agree that there are possibly too many blown highlights; certainly in the first - in the second and third I can still see detail in 90%+ of the image which is ok for me

The problem here is that many oriental Asian women prefer to look as light as possible (and will spend relative fortunes on creams etc to make their skin whiter), and so I've probably gone a little OTT in lightening the image. When adjusting the image I was concentrating mainly on my partner, afterall it was her day

Without suffering an earbashing from her (and making the image darker, in turn her too), do you have any idea on how to counter this?

Thanks,

Andy.

[Jonathan Wienke]

Use levels only to set your white and black points; I have levels set to clip .01% of black and white. This gives you maximum contract with minimal clipping; only a few pixels are actually clipped, so you don't lose highlight or shadow detail. Then use curves to set overall image luminosity; as long as you don't mess with the ends of the curve, you can do anything you want to the middle within reason without clipping. Then I use midtone-masked local contrast enhancement and sharpening to "punch up" the image further, again without losing shadow or highlight detail.

[Gordon Buck]

In Photoshop, you might try the Shadow/Highlight adjustment.  My impression is that the same effect can be obtained in other ways but Shadow/Highlight adjustment is easily done and seems effective.

[Jonathan Wienke]

Shadow/highlight wouldn't help with the images here. It is only effective when shadow and highlight detail exists, but is difficult to see. Once clipping has occurred, it can't help any more.