Photoshop | Lightroom | Editing | Retouching | Virginia Family Photographer

In this day and age of Instagram Filters, apps that smooth your skin, make your eyes bigger, and add a flower crown, who needs a photographer retouching images, right? I mean, maybe you don’t! But as one of those photographers myself, I think that there will always be a place for tastefully edited but still true to life imagery. It’s taken years and years for me to hone my craft of not only shooting, but shooting with a final edit in mind. I’m drawn to bright colors, natural tones and a little bit of drama here and there.

If you’ve worked with me before, you know that my turnaround time tends to be between 2-3 weeks. This might seem crazy given that I’m shooting in a digital medium, but the main reason for that is photoshop and lightroom editing and photo retouching and the time that it takes. Editing is my favorite and sometimes least favorite part of photography. After a particularly tiring day with the kiddos, nothing is more relaxing to me than cracking open the old macbook pro and prettying up some images.

I’ve always been upfront about the fact that I love authenticity and raw emotion in images, but also completely understand that every now and then a mother likes to have the dark circles under her eyes diminished slightly. Because I do. Because gosh darnit, I’m tired. So it’s a delicate balance between adding some wow factor, but also keeping images true to life.

I’m mostly using images of my own family, and then a cow, because hopefully they don’t mind. As far as my actual process, I start in Adobe Lightroom, where I decide which images from a session are the best, and usually I make sure that the white balance and exposure is correct on each. From there I run actions that I’ve made on all of the images within a certain lighting or setting. Then lastly, I edit the images in photoshop to do some fine tuning of details.

I tell clients that light dictates their session outcome and it’s 100% true. Light and shadow are truly my sources of inspiration, and they run the show…I just follow along. And I should also say that I am by no means a master editor or retoucher. I find that my styles and preferences change over time as dictated by my mood and the feeling of a session. I do know that over the years I have learned and grown in my craft, as I cringe at edits that I thought were top notch years ago!