First Wedding Pic - Opinions Please

[Herby]

Can you please tell me if i've enhanced this effectively and if not how it should be done. The first one is the original, second after I played around with it. Feel free to play with it but tell me what you did.

Wedding was at Sanctuary Cove last weekend. This was one of the better shots. A lot of them didn't turn out as there were huge windows behind the couple causing the pics to be dark.

Thanks

[Bozo]

Herby, it's such a pleasant shot, with their personalities at their truest. You have done a good job improving contrast and enhancing...only trouble is...that annoying light that is in the worst possible place. Just cloning that out and getting rid of the bright spot on the door would make a big improvement IMHO.

Pity about the big windows, did you try to get some shots using spot exposure metering to expose the image for subjects only rather than the backlit scene as a whole?

Regards,
Brendan

[Herby]

Thank you Bozo. I did try quickly to clone out the lights and it does look a lot better. Still had a bit of orange around their hair though. When I get the time i'll have to do it in more detail. Is there an easy way to do this?

I didn't worry too much about getting the lighting right - thought i'd stay out of the way and leave it to the professional photographer.

Cheers

[Smorter]

Herby the original lacks "pop" but I don't like how you've piled on the saturation in the second photo. Did you use JPG or RAW? With RAW it's very easy in the raw converter to up the contrast and exposure and curves to make the image more colourful and vivid without blowing certain colour channels which cause the image to look dingy. I think your second photo is an improvement though, save for the guy's face which is a bit too red.

If you encounter a brighter background/backlit subject, the camera will underexpose the foreground typically and the camera's limited Dynamic Range will mean that you might not be able to push up the exposure of the foreground if the foreground subjects are too dark.

There are a few ways to counter this:

1. Fill Flash (Preferably Bounced off a wall or ceiling slightly behind you). You let the camera expose for the background, and you use your flash to light up the foreground so both foreground and background are properly exposed.

2. Use a Reflector to reflect some light back to foreground subjects

3. Hold the camera steady and shoot a bracketed multi burst at +/-2 stops, and combine the shots in Photoshop using Layers.

4. As Brendan said, spot meter for the foreground and allow the background to blow out

In all instances make sure to use RAW to maximise Dynamic Range

[Herby]

Thanks for feedback Smorter. Pic is JPG. I'll have to play around with it again.

Thanks for the tips on lighting.

[Herby]

Finally had a chance to play with this a bit.

Got rid of the white light and turned down the saturation a bit as suggested.

Tried cloning out the big light. Because there is an orange glow from the light on Mark's hair, I found it hard to clone the light out. Is there an easy way to do this?

Cheers