Help! The lighting is all wrong!

I am new at photography and am not trained. I began taking pics at weddings

for friends and have done alright. I had a wedding this weekend indoors and

when I looked at the screen, the images looked great. When I downloaded, the

lighting was horribly off and grainy. Please help me correct these. I am

trying to use Photoshop elements 2 and what I have done doesn't seem all that

great!<div></div>

LCDs aren't a guaranteed proofing tool. :)

 

Check the brightness of your LCD. It could be that it's set too high, and that while you see

a well-exposed image on the LCD, you're actually under-exposing. (Some LCDs read

brighter than others.)

 

What was your ISO on this shot? A high ISO will create this type of grain.

 

You'll also get softer images like this by shooting with cheaper lenses.

 

In the future, refer to your camera's histogram to confirm that you're getting the exposure

you want.

The EXIF data shows that it was shot at ISO 400 in Program mode, f5@1/60 sec and the flash went off. The shot is just a little underexposed 'and you needed more flash from the camera to balance the bright overhead light and get some light on the bride's face.<div></div>

I agree with Anne - change the brightness of your LCD. You don't say which camera you are using. If it is Nikon, they traditionally underexpose. However that can be a good thing. More exposure in your original and the highlights in the dress would be blown out and lost. At least with the image underexposed, you can post process to hold the detail in the highlights while bringing up the shadows. In Photoshop CS2 this can be done through image>adjustments>shadow/highlight. Not sure if this is available in Elements.

 

What I see more than exposure is poor lighting - top and behind. I would highly recommend off camera bounce flash to solve this situation.

 

I just did a 30 sec adjustment using the CS2 method I described. Your images can be corrected, and then the situation avoided in the future.

Shooting in Program mode means you were using your flash on auto/TTL/ETTL. It's

automatically going to underexpose in order to avoid blowing out the dress. An off-camera

flash on a manual power will allow you to push more light toward her face AND expose

properly for the dress. :)

Sunny, learn to use your camera's LCD Histogram ... the camera manual will tell you how

to activate it.

 

It is a far more reliable indication of exposure range at the time of capture. Rule of thumb

is to expose so the Histogram graph is skewed as far right as possible without clipping

(aka, "blowing" ) the bright areas.

 

The Histogram on your shot is bunched up to the left clearly indicating underexposure.

 

Another reason an LCD view can trick you is if you are shooting in fairly strong Tungsten

light and do not have your white balance set correctly is will look brighter than it really is.

In my experience, this is a more common reason than a LCD screen being set to bright.

 

Try to learn the use of manual exposure rather than Program Mode when doing formals ...

and then experiment with riding the TTL Flash compensation to control the balance

between the light on the subject verses the light in the background.

I selected the underexposed face and areas to do a quick fix. Fill flash needed to open detail in the face. The above advice is good.<div></div>

It is very difficult to get the lighting right when the bride's dress is the closest thing to the flash. You will always get an underexposed bride or an overexposed dress. Underexposure is always better with digital, and that's what your camera's meter will tend to do in this case. The best way that I've found to fix this is with carefully placed off camera flashes, or shooting with all natural light. Also, if you shoot with flash, and you don't like the orange light in the shadows, use a gell on your light to correct your flash's color.

I'm just wondering how you managed to book Tonya Harding's wedding.

Hmm... I did my best keeping it "real" and not to lose any fine detail of the dress.<div></div>

<a href="http://www.gototem.com/00LtXb-37502784b.JPG" >Fixed up photo</a>

 

If I were you I wouldn't even attempt wedding photography until you get a proper toolbox of

software to work with your images. It's far too much responsibility to have without at least a

much better safety net than PhotoShop Elements.

One thing that will help immensely is to shoot in RAW mode. You will have much more control over fixing things that way.

 

I second the part about better tools. You should have Photoshop and Noise Ninja at a minimum.

 

Later,

 

Paulsky

use the histogram.

 

forget program mode - shoot in manual, and shoot in raw.

 

you need to learn how to light the bride's face much better next time - either find a window and use a reflector or an umbrella or go outdoors and find some open shade.

 

shooting a wedding, and then going on a forum to discuss the results that you aren't happy with, can be a bit risky. I hope that you didn't charge your couple much...

oh yes, forget fill flash. try to do as much off camera as possible.

Mearle- I just wanted to say that your edit is BY FAR the best (not to put down the others..my eye just caught this). Care to tell us what you did?

Thank you, Sunny. Not enough photographers really know the true power of PhotoShop. But

any of the advanced tutorial lesson DVDs will cover this sort of stuff. It was only a matter of

creating two curve adjustment layers, one to lighten and tone for the proper skin color and

one to darken for the vignette, then painting through the masks to reveal the degree of

change desired.

Kori. Not Sunny.

 

Sorry.

you're right, the power of photoshop is amazing. However, a successful photographer shouldn't need it and although there are always pictures that need it, they don't have time for it. I recently started working for a wedding photographer and they don't do ANY post processing to their photos. They send the pictures to the lab that prints them and the lab does some color correcting and any specifics that we ask for (i.e. remove sweat or smooth dress wrinkles). They just pay the lab to do the dirty work. ha.

Kori - You can be dead certain the best and most highly paid wedding photographers use

PhotoShop extensively to add a signature look to anything they publish. Personally I do

almost everything I need in Lightroom these days, but with the special photos from every

wedding getting the deluxe attention in PhotoShop. I would never dream of farming out my

post processing.

So that means they're shooting less weddings to have the time to do that or just hiring people that are there only to post process? Are you photoshopping every picture or just a few from each wedding?

let me correct... do you process every picture in Lightroom?

Everything I do enters LightRoom with the Auto Tone preset turned on as a default. So,

effectively, yes. One wants to automate the workflow as much as possible. And the Auto Tone

preset actually saves a lot of time fine tuning each one by hand. That doesn't deal with

backlit images so well, or situations with harsh high noon lighting, but a few quick slider

changes takes care of that for the most part. One has to screen every photo anyway for the

throw-aways vs keepers.