Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Wedding Photo Wednesday: Not-so-insurmountable project

We have a huge project ahead of us, one that I've been putting off since September. That's right, I still haven't edited wedding photos. Beyond scanning the photos given to me by my stepdad or uploaded to the paid Flickr site we set up just so we'd have easy access to all of our guests' photos, I haven't even really given a second thought to how we would preserve our wedding for posterity.
It's not that I don't enjoy looking through the photos. So much of that night was a blur, so it's fun to go back and relive some of the moments that have grown fuzzy. The problem is that completing the task always seemed a little insurmountable.
Not only would I have to tone and crop the photos, I'd have to weed out the ones that, despite how much I like the moment they represent, really don't deserve to be printed due to quality issues. There seem to be a lot of those, unfortunately.
Luckily we were introduced to a program from Creative Memories that makes it much easier to pull something together that we can eventually have professionally printed. Basically we purchased the company's Memories Manager, which not only organizes files but also allows me to edit photos within the program and with many of the more useful Photoshop tools, and Storybook Creator, which is basically a program that lets me lay out scrapbook pages using a computer interface similar to scaled-down InDesign. In fact there are some options I wish PS or ID had that are really easy to do in the programs. Plus, instead of buying our programs straight from the company, we were able to support a friend who also happens to be a consultant (go to her page if you are interested in scrapbooking! If you look at her profile picture, you may recognize her husband as a pretty awesome biology professor at CNU). She is EXTREMELY passionate about the programs. Seriously. A quick demo from her was all it took to convince us. Plus the awesome markdowns that were going to end two days after we finally had time to meet with her. Talk about serendipity.

I say all that to preview a new weekly post I'll launch today: Wedding Photo Wednesday will be an ongoing look at some of the photo editing and scrapbook page layouts I've been working on. This serves the purpose of giving me deadlines (which I work better on) and giving you guys a chance to critique some of my work.
I'm brand new to this particular program, but like I said, it's so similar to PS that I had no trouble adapting (though I miss a lot of the useful shortcuts Adobe developers spent so long coding) and already have examples of editing that I've done.

This first picture is an example of some of the detail shots that I am really grateful that some people thought to capture. The colors in this particular shot are sort of washed out and there a few pesky background components that really annoyed me.

So I cropped it to bring the centerpiece in as the focal point. I did a few other things, but if you can't find them, then I'm happy not to point them out:


I loved this next shot for capturing a great shot of dad getting ready to give me away, and Travis ready to take me. Can you guess what annoyed me about this one?

Well, color definitely became an issue. My dress in most of the photos looked white when it's not white at all. In fact, my favorite thing about that dress was the color, and that of course is my biggest challenge with most of the photos. But that wasn't even the hardest part with this shot.

If you thought I just cropped my mom's elbow out, you're wrong. If had just done that, I would have lost my bouquet (which took too much work just to crop out) and that detail of Travis in the upper, left hand corner ready to receive me. So I used the editing software's simple cloning tool.
It only took me about 5 minutes to not only completely rid my mom from the shot (sorry, Mom), but to also replace it with believable details, like continuing the pattern the sun was making in the grass and remembering to give Travis the leg my mom was blocking in the original.

So, what do you think?

1 comment:

  1. looks great! both of them :)

    now i need to remember to post my pictures to your flicker because i may have never remembered to do that. or if you see any on facebook you like, i can email them to you directly.

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