The Wedding Portrait - An exercise in Photoshop

A couple of weekends ago I had my first attempt at photographing a wedding. Portrait and event photography isn't something I'm particularly interested in - I much prefer landscape and sport. The bride was a close family friend, and the wedding was not overly formal and they didn't want a professional photographer for the event so I got the call up (owning a Canon 1 Series DSLR will do that). Overall, I found the photography enjoyable, but I should have been more prepared by carrying some drink and sports bars in my camera pack - you don't want to miss any of the action ducking out for a drink or a snack, so by the end of the event I was pretty thirsty and hungry.

I decided to print on photo out at A3+ (13" * 19") for the couple, and wanted to do a black-and-white print to give it more of a classical feel. The photo below, taken during the ceremony was the starting point for the print.



In terms of photographic quality, I'd describe the starting point as nice but with some obvious problems. I was too far away for the flash to have much of an effect in the strong sunlight that broke through during the ceremony (it was pouring rain 10 minutes after this), and the shadows in the original shot are a serious problem. The easiest Photoshop tool to cut rid of the severe shadows is to use Image | Adjustments | Shadows/Highlights..., but you can't apply this effect to an adjustment layer, so you have to start duplicating layers, which I don't particularly like to do. Knowing that Shadows/Highlights was going to come into play, and that it can give a weird fluorescent look to green vegetation like the background in this image, a mask to cover everything except the bride and groom was needed. Given that, the bottom-most visible layer would only contribute the green background to the final image, so I could blur and darken this to de-emphasize it, as shown below. This was done after duplicating the base so that an original was still available.


Next, I created a duplicate of the original layer, applied a fairly aggressive Shadow/Highlight adjustment, with Shadow amount set to 70%. Then, I brushed in a layer mask so just the couple where left from the layer.


On this layer, I removed any skin or lens blemishes with the Healing Brush and Blur Tool. Once I was happy with the result, I added a subtle lightening using an Adjustment Layer, and then took a duplicated Shadow\Highlight layer, applied an aggressive sharpening, and masked out everything but the eyes. The final layers look like:


Next, I grouped all the objects into a Smart Object, and used Convert to BW Pro 3 from The Imaging Factory on a rasterized copy of the Smart Object. The main options where to apply a light yellow-orange filter to enhance the skin tones and to bump up the contrast by setting the Paper Grade equivalent to around 3. The final result:


The left sides of the couples face, which was in really deep shadow, has been recovered well, and thanks to a little blurring, no artifacts are visible in the recovered areas. The job done by Shadow\Highlight is particularly impressive around the grooms chin and neck which look to be in total shadow in the original.

Overall, I was quite happy with the result. The end image (to my eye anyway) didn't look over-done, and the print looked fantastic.