Watch out for this     

 

When you're evaluating wedding photographers one thing we highly suggest is to ask to see a recent wedding.  If at all possible ask to see an album they are going to give a client.  What they sell to others is more than likely what you'll get.   Back in the old days of film based photography images were printed one at a time, and thus color labs would color correct all the images.  These days with multiple images being montaged onto  album layout color correction issues cannot be addressed by the labs.  

These days photographers have more freedom to correct every image, and actually make better looking images than back in the days of film.  That is, if they are interested in doing this.  What we're seeing more and more of these days are uncorrected images coming out of the camera and going right into the album.   It takes what could have been a good photo and ruins it forever.    So, when you're evaluating photographers, ask to see what they are giving to clients.  Here's some examples of what we've seen. 

 

Image #1 

 

If you don't have a great monitor it may be hard to tell but this image has too much red and yellow.  The contrast is low, its boring.  These types of color shifts are common with digital cameras depending upon the lighting condition.  It's a photographer's job to fix this before the client sees it.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image #2 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The same image, just color corrected.  Notice how the bride's white dress still has detail in it?

 

 

 

Image #3 

 

 

Here's a lackluster black and white image, the contrast is dead, it's mushy, and slightly dark. 

 

 

 

Same image with enhanced contrast, nothing else has  changed.  It has a bit more lively.   

 

The fun thing about being a wedding photographer is going to  a wedding, having fun, hanging out, and having people dig your work.  The things that aren't as much fun is to do the actual leg work.   Things such as file management, color correction, and retouching are boring to many photographers and thus they are skipped.   To make it more complicated, color management is rather confusing.  A properly color balanced monitor takes effort.   The goal is to have what appears on the monitor to come out looking very similar to what the final print looks like.   A lot of photographers have a problem with this and thus they don't even make an effort to correct their images.   Whatever comes out of the camera is as good as it gets!