Terrible Wedding Pictures

<p>My wife and I hired a friend to take our photos at our wedding. He is new to the business, and after viewing some of his shoots form other weddings we went with him. The good is the artistic direction of the photos are acceptable to good, the bad is they were not shot well. I myself have ventured into the realm of photography as a hobby and am new to terminologies and methods. I purchased a Canon 450D and a used copy of Lightroom 3.<br>

I have noticed that the pictures he took were very washed out or dark. The coloring also lacks sufficient contrast. I thought I would tweak them out myself while learning Lightroom. After 20+ hours of editing and editing and more editing I finally managed to salvage most of the photos into what I think look great!<br>

One problem....I didn't know about color space when I ventured into this, and now they look absolutely terrible no matter how I export them. I know that ProPhoto > Adobe1998 > sRGB. I have tried all three, and all three look awful when viewing them in any other program other than Lightroom or my trial of Photoshop CS5.<br>

I'm completely at a loss for what to do. I have tried to export them to Photoshop, and then export them out of CS5 without keeping the ProPhoto, and they look awful. I'm at my wits end and about to give up on our photos, especially since I understand most prints don't take ProPhoto. Please help me!</p>

<p>Justin, it's hard to know exactly what went wrong without seeing some images. <br>

One crucial question is whether you made a copy of the original files before editing them, or whether you kept the CF cards with the images untouched. If so, you can always get a postprocessing expert to diagnose what's wrong, and fix the shots as much as possible, or work on them yourself when you have more experience with the software.</p>

<p>Hard to say based on your description - but one thing to look out for is that you need to convert them from one color space to another, not merely assign another color space. The fact that they look OK in CS5 but not anywhere else makes me believe that you don't convert to sRGB from the space you are in when you save the images (not sure what you mean by export).</p>

<p>Lr3 publishing is pretty much foolproof, or so I had thought. Have you tried the main publishing actions? Any of the Slideshow, Print, or Web modules do a great job with minimum fuss. If you're exporting, select sRGB as the colorspace unless you know definitely it will be viewed only with color managed viewers or browsers. sRGB is usually the answer if it looks different on screen than in LR.</p>

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<p>I have an idea of what might be wrong...is your monitor calibrated?</p>

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<p>I have tried to export them to Photoshop, and then export them out of CS5 without keeping the ProPhoto, and they look awful.</p>

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<p>Convert them all to sRGB. You need to set up an action in Photoshop to batch do the lot. Do NOT use "assign profile" instructi, use "convert to profile". To be safe, you will want to set the action to save in a different folder leaving your originals untouched.</p>

<p>After that, the converted images should look fine, even when viewed in programmes that can't handle colour profiles.</p>