Brides Skin Retouching and Smoothing in Wedding Photography

I have to start out by saying wedding make-up artists do a fantastic job and this is in no way a comment on their skills, all of the brides I have had the pleasure of photographing really have looked amazing without exception. A bride should look her very best on her biggest day and leave it to the wedding photographers to capture the details for them to remember. There are always 2 photographers covering all the angles, in photography terms. We take photos from large wide, 150+ people group shots to the slightest change in emotion on the happy couples faces and for this we sometimes need to be zoomed in, way in!

Wakefield Wedding Photographer before Skin Retouching

Wakefield Wedding Photographer after Skin Retouching

We all know about the levels of photoshop retouching super models go through even after hours of make-up procedure. Unfortunately in the high definition age we live in, cameras pick up every detail, good or bad and my job as a wedding photographer is to highlight the good bits and mask or hide the bad. I am of the opinion a bride wants to look her very best on her wedding day and as photographers, we are employed to use our wedding photography skills to produce the very best images. This is why I do a certain amount of retouching of the brides skin in photoshop. It is also worth noting that it is easy to go overboard with skin smoothing and if done incorrectly you will end up with a plastic, botox-to-hell, psycho-doll-type look, and nobody wants that.

This is a typical example of the type of skin retouching I do, not too much but enough to really make the skin glow.