How Much Editing Should you Expect from your City Hall Wedding Photographer?
This is probably one of the most common questions I receive from our San Francisco city hall brides and grooms. Usually the question is this: “Do you edit the wedding photos?” However, I think that the question really should be about how much editing is done and to what extent. Whenever I receive this question I explain to the couple that yes, we do edit ALL of your photos and this includes making sure the photos are cropped properly, straightened and color corrected. Obviously, you deserve wedding photos that are perfectly exposed. Of course, there are other types of editing that can be done before the couple receives their wedding photos. I think it would be very helpful to make a list of the various types of editing that can be done for San Francisco city hall wedding photography. The list below may not be totally complete, but it includes 99% of the type of edits that are possible.
- Color Correction – Making sure all the colors appear as they should be and the whites look white.
- Exposure Correction – All the photos should be properly exposed, not too dark or light.
- Cropping – Photos should all be properly framed and cropped for the best look possible.
- Distortion Correction – This is very important with Architecture photos at City Hall.
- Culling – The couple does not need a thousand photos, they should be parred down.
- People/Stranger Removal – Eliminating people you don’t know from your wedding photos.
- Removal of Distracting Items – City Hall has neon exit signs, fire extinguishers, and garbage cans.
- Personal Enhancement / Retouching – Improving the appearance of the bride and groom.
What Level of Editing Should You Receive For Your Money?
I feel like any professional San Francisco city hall wedding photographer should provide you with the top 5 editing techniques from the above list. Your final city hall pictures should all be color and exposure corrected. They should be culled down to eliminate obvious duplicates and photos that are blurry or have other problems. Unless your wedding photographer was able to do it properly in the camera, the pictures should be properly cropped. Lastly, any distortion in wide angle shots should be eliminated. In my opinion this is the least you should expect from your city hall wedding photographer. Do other wedding photographers edit their photos extensively? Here is an article that discusses some of the types of photo editing that other photographers feel is appropriate.
The next 2 items on the list are debatable and worthy of further discussion. SF City Hall is a public building with tourists, visitors and other brides and groom wandering about. Should your wedding photography be responsible for keeping your photos free of these strangers? I think the answer depends upon what level of wedding photographer you hired. It also may depend upon how much you are paying. I think a discount city hall wedding photographer will most likely not be able to remove people from your pictures and still give you a low price. It can be very time consuming and costly do offer this level of photo editing.
Medium to higher end wedding photographers should either do their best to not capture strangers in the photos or they should remove them when possible using Photoshop or another comparable editing software. This is pretty much our own personal approach, you will not receive many and possibly no pictures with strangers in the background if you book our service for your San Francisco city hall wedding. The one exception to this is Mayor’s Balcony reserved weddings. In this case we will selectively edit and do people removal upon request. We also feel like the other distracting items like exit signs and garbage cans should either not be shown or removed during the editing process. We can also crop them out sometimes. Who wants a blue garbage can in their wedding photos?
Photoshop for Personal Enhancement in Wedding Pictures
This the final question and one that I receive all of the time is regarding personal enhancement of the bride and groom. People want to know if we retouch their San Francisco city hall wedding photos. The answer to this question is definitely going to vary. Some wedding photographers will limit the number of final pictures they deliver to their brides and grooms, but will provide some level of retouching. This might be possible if you are keeping the number of photos you promise at a minimum. However, if you are going to send the newlyweds all of the photos you took at their wedding it would be nearly impossible to retouch every single photo without some sort of upcharge. The other issue is how much retouching does the couple want? Some people might just want you to remove a facial blemish or enhance the area under the eyes. Other couples may want much more complex enhancement like slimming down waists, etc. There is such a wide variety of the type of personal enhancement that a wedding photographer can do. This makes it impossible to provide one solid answer.
What Do We Offer Our SF City Hall Wedding Clients?
Going back to the original list, we provide our newlyweds with everything on the list with no extra charge except the personal enhancement. This means the couple is receiving fully edited wedding pictures from their San Francisco city hall wedding. To see some examples of our city hall wedding pictures click the link. We limit our retouching to ordered prints and wedding albums. If our client requests some very complex retouching we will handle this on a case by case basis and charge extra accordingly. We make sure to make the pricing of any retouching reasonable and fair. I can honestly say that almost all of our clients have been satisfied with their retouching requests. If for some reason they are not, we keep going until they are happy.
Summing It All Up
San Francisco city hall is a unique wedding venue with amazing beauty and architecture everywhere you look. What also makes city hall different is all of this beauty is in a totally public building. Anyone can come in and look around and take pictures. They can even sit on the Grand Staircase if they want and they can do it all day. We are experts at shooting weddings at this venue and we know how to avoid these problems. Hiring an experienced San Francisco city hall wedding photographer is your best bet to receive fully edited photos taken at the optimum spots in the building. Just be sure to ask the photographer what their policy is when it comes to editing photos. Hopefully this guide will help you to understand what they are saying and to ask the proper questions.