“Help. I hate my wedding pictures. What can I do?”
Take a deep breath. There is a decent chance your pictures can be fixed, and Maxime Photo and Video is here to help.
True Story: An old college friend called last week, disappointed with her wedding photos. (Don’t worry, we didn’t take them.) She planned a beautiful destination wedding in Mexico, relying on the hotel catering director to organize a professional wedding photographer. Even though Jill and I created a thorough checklist of her MUST HAVE criteria for choosing a photographer, things didn’t turn out like we’d hoped. She ended up with the lobby receptionist (moonlighting as a wedding photographer.) After the disappointment and a few tears; we got to work. We started from scratch, using the original files. Re-edited, color balanced and cropped. Voila…we saved the day. I am happy to say, Jill now has fond memories of her romantic, beachside wedding and we’re designing a lovely album for her coffee table.
Don’t despair, as long as the camera, with your photos, didn’t sink to the bottom of the ocean…you stand a good chance of reworking the images and producing pretty wedding pictures that remind you of the beautiful day you really had.
So, you’re not happy with your wedding pictures.
- First order of business: how many pictures did he/she give you? If you tell me: 1000 or 2500…then your wedding photographer is just plain ol’ lazy. You have too many. How can you see through the clutter? The good ones are in there. Edit, edit, and more editing. Even with two photographers working all day, we never give the client more than 750 – ever! We aim for 500, but sometimes things are just too durn pretty and the numbers creep up.
- Speaking of numbers, how many images did they take? You have to take a lot, to get a few perfect ones. Wedding photography is a numbers game. If you want guaranteed great wedding pictures, make sure you hire two wedding photographers. Accidents happen and batteries go dead at the wrong times. (Murphy loves weddings.) With two shooters, it’s a safe bet that the important moments are going to be documented.
- How much did you spend on your wedding photography package? A couple of hundred dollars? Well then, you’re going to have to spend a couple of hundred more to get them fixed. You get what you pay for. More than half of our time is spent on wedding photographs – after we’re done taking them! Wedding photography requires a lot of experienced, concentrated, technical work. The cheaper the camera, the more time you spend making adjustments in post-production. A high-end camera, with an experienced computer tech will require a 1:2 ratio (2 hours fixing on the computer vs. 1 hour shooting pictures.) A less expensive, older, or less professional camera can require 3:1 (3 hours fixing vs. 1 hour shooting.)
- Original files. To get the best out of your images, it’s important to work with the original files that came from the camera. Ideally, you are looking for file extensions that end in “CR2” (these are called RAW files.) They are larger file sizes, with more data or info. A bit trickier to work with; but produce terrific results. All of our wedding photos are recorded in “RAW.” After we make the necessary color and cropping adjustments, we save them for our clients in jpeg format, so they are faster to load, and easier to view.
It’s never too late to get it right. Were you disappointed by your wedding photographs? Trust me, if you don’t fix them, you’re never going to forget it. You’ll be 80 years old and still telling the bitter story. So, spend the money and time and fix them now.
Never Settle. Let our proven pros take a look. Even if you didn’t hire us, we’re here for you. You’ll be surprised by what a bit of caring and technical know-how can do.