Not only is today Thanksgiving, but it is also Shonee’s and my 21st wedding anniversary! If we were to give advice to any couples planning a wedding it would be this.
First… don’t get married on or near a holiday… it is much better to spread out your reasons to celebrate. To make matter’s worse… Shonee’s birthday was yesterday.
Second… hire a professional photographer to shoot your wedding. Long after the cake is eaten and the blender you received is in a landfill somewhere, the photos will be all you’ve got. We had a “family friend” take our photos to save some money and Shonee says that is the only regret she has (and it’s a BIG regret)… which is good news for me.
Since it’s our 21st anniversary I decided to take a look at our old wedding photos and see if I could improve them at all with some of the technology and cool computer programs we have today.
Here’s one of the photos I pulled out of our album…
At first glance, one assumes that our wedding took place on Mars due to the orange glow. The image is also out of focus and there are some compositional elements that could be improved. This is actually one of the best images from our album.
I took the photo and scanned it into the computer, saving it as a jpeg. In Lightroom I corrected the colors so that Shonee is wearing a white dress. Next I opened the image in Photoshop and played around with “painting” the background using the Mixer Brush Tool. I also added the date. It took about five or ten minutes to get this image. It’s far from perfect… but I think it looks a lot better and that’s the point.
I wanted to see what it would look like without color so I created this black & white image using Nik Silver Efex Pro.
Now Shonee wants me to redo all our photos and create a new album. She says, “her life will be complete if I do that for her.” I guess I know what I’ll be giving her for our 22nd anniversary…
Happy Thanksgiving!
No comments:
Post a Comment