Skin tones in wedding photos

01.12.10 / behind the camera / Author: G.E. Masana

Digital photography is still a relatively new development in the wedding photography world, and so, there’s a learning curve involved. It’s not a matter of simply picking up the camera and bingo! you’re getting top notch images because there are matters peculiar to digital needing to be addressed that, because it’s a somewhat newer process, haven’t dawned on many photographers.

I gave a couple of examples in a previous post showing how other wedding photographers are blowing out the details in the bridal gowns or not adjusting for the blue cast digital renders in the whites of the gowns. I really think they’re not “seeing” it because they’re unaware of it. That being the case, it’s as if invisible to them. Like the saying goes, “you don’t know what you don’t know!”

I’m going to open up your eyes.

It’s only then, after you’ve been made aware, that you’ll notice what I’m talking about again and again in wedding photo after wedding photo.

Are you ready, Neo?

Skin coloring, or “skin tones” is another area where post production work on the wedding images is often overlooked or passed on. You’ll see all sorts of color casts in the skin from photo to photo.

Now, granted, there’s a wide variety of skin coloring in the population (even in caucasians). Yet the idea, when it comes to photographs, is to kind of rein it all in and make it look pleasing so it flatters the subjects.

Commercial photographers, such as those doing fashion work for magazines, already know this and they do it. It’s not an option. But for some reason, many wedding photographers don’t do it at all (well, the reason is most likely because when it comes to wedding photography lately, all you need to do is pick up a camera and claim you’re a wedding photographer. And believe it or not, there are people who will hire you, sadly enough, even though you have the flimsiest of experience and entrust you to document their wedding; whereas with fashion photography, you actually have to be talented and proficient and prove yourself to experienced, demanding, nationally published photo editors who will only hire you if you have the right stuff to meet their exacting, high quality standards).

In my wedding album photos I follow the commercial photography wisdom to adjust skin tones in almost every image, just to make folks look wonderful. It’s not just done by eye to taste; there’s actually more or less a formula for what goes into a pleasing skin tone. Sometimes this can mean adjusting skin tones on different people separately within one wedding photo because of the wide diversity of skin coloring among people, even sometimes adjusting different parts of just one person’s own skin (as their arms, neck or face may all be way different tones) to harmonize it all together.

True, this is probably more labor than the typical studio would ever put into any one wedding album photo. But speaking just for me, this is where I find my personal standards lead me to, and I’ve found I have to honor that to be satisfied with my product.

So from now on, whenever you see a purple skin cast or a blue one or yellow (unless it’s specifically done as some kind of purposeful art tinting, as in rendering a vintage look for instance), you’ll know it’s because the photographer is most probably overlooking the finessing of their wedding photos.

As a matter of fact, in a recent consultation, a bride-to-be told me about how her friend’s wedding pictures from another studio had the “wrong colors” in them, explaining how the ring shot came out yellow instead of the white gold it was in real life. Again, this is all about wedding studios not taking the step of accurate post production work on their photographs, as most studios don’t take this step because they’re either not aware of the need for it, or even if they are, it’s not only time consuming to do, but also means someone has to be paid to do the labor – and be skilled enough to do it correctly – so it’s very often not something that can be done at all by the typical studio.

Here are a few before & after examples so you can see the difference it makes. The top row of straight-out-of-the-camera photos had an orange-yellow cast (the long island wedding studio they were shot for did not do any production work on the images at all); the bottom row are the remastered versions: