A couple months ago I made this post about Yulia's bridal portrait. After taking these images in her regular wedding gown, we did a quick makeup, hair and wardrobe change. Yulia really wanted to go for it, so we took her bridal portraits in a completely different direction.

We started out with a dramatic hair/makeup change by the fabulous Dawn Tunnell.

While we were changing hair and makeup a bridal party and photographer marched past us down the meadow. I thought they were doing bridal portraits but as it turned out it was an actual wedding ceremony.

Then Dawn and my assistant Paige held up this blanket for a make-shift dressing room.

We were going for the bride-of-Frankenstein look. Here's what we got:

Image #1 was lit, and the other two were natural light. In this post I sang the praises of the Alien Bees, saying how in the past 4 years they've never failed on me. Well, the AB800 I brought with me finally did. Just died.  So all of our lighting on this shoot was done with the backup, a plain old Canon 580exII with a 60" umbrella.

The last few frames of the day we may have lost our minds.

Shelby & John's wedding last weekend was lots of fun and a bit wacky (in a good way). I'll explain in a minute.

Shelby and John got engaged at Gasworks Park, so that's where they wanted to go for their portraits. (note to photographers: this is an almost identical shot to the one from my tutorial below on shooting in midday sun.)

John found this football and put Shelby to work. Not too shabby a throw...

A few minutes later we came upon a photographer doing a fashion shoot with a model. She was nice enough to show us a few poses...

We stumbled upon a large gathering of nudists. We met Richard The Naked Guy, who took some time out of his busy day to pose for a snapshot.

Next on our agenda was a brief stop at Dick's Drive In for some shakes. When we got there, a boatload (literally) of pirates jumped out of their ship and grabbed Shelby and John for this picture.

The rest of the wedding was less eventful, but still beautiful.

Okay, you're in a situation where you have to shoot some portraits, but it's midday in July. The sun is blazing and there isn't a cloud in sight. The light is brutally harsh. What do you do? You can't make excuses and tell your client the light stinks - they hired you to get beautiful portraits and it's your job to get them!

You can look for shade, but what if there isn't any? You can try overpowering the sun with your flash. With on-camera flash, this looks pretty terrible. It might be cool if you have some radio poppers and an assistant so you can use off-camera flash with high-speed sync, but what if that isn't an option?

The answer is simple - just put your subject in-between your camera and the sun. Unless you live on the equator, even at midday the sun is at a slight angle, not directly overhead. Just make a straight line using three points - the sun, then your subject, then you. Your subjects' faces will be in shade and the sun directly behind them will make a nice rim light.

This portrait was taken on July 13, 2008 at 12:15pm. Blazing sun, not a cloud in the sky. (Canon 5D w/70-200mm f2.8L IS lens @200mm, ISO 200, f4.5, 1/800 sec, +0 EC):

I'm off to Boston at the crack of dawn Monday to shoot a big corporate event and an engagement session. I'll be checking email, but might be a little slower to respond than usual.

This tutorial is about how I get my images ready for my clients to view. You can call this step proofing, or color-correcting, or even raw-conversion (since I always shoot raw). This is not retouching (dodging and burning, removing blemishes, fancy artwork, whitening teeth, etc.) which is a subject for another day.

The proofs are what my clients see when they're deciding which images to order. It's only after the order is placed that the image gets the full workup in Photoshop. There are a few things I want to note here:

- Never show your clients straight-out-of-the-camera images. You're a professional, so you should always be showing your clients great looking images. You can't say, "don't worry, these images haven't been color corrected - they'll look great when you get them." Sorry, that's lame.  Your clients paid for a professional product, so they should see professionally presented images right from the start.

- On the other hand, fully retouching every image is a quick road to bankruptcy. There aren't enough hours in the day to do this, and even if there were, other aspects of your business and life would suffer. For a typical portrait shoot, I'll fully retouch a handful of images to show the client what to expect for the finished product. Then I'll give the full treatment to every image that they actually order.

- I do all my proof work using Lightroom. There are many great tools for proofing - LR, Aperture, Bridge/ACR, C1, etc.  Don't use Photoshop for preparing proofs - it will take you 5x longer.

Using LR, I pretty much work from top down on the "Develop" panel.

See these boxes in the upper corners of the historgram? Make sure you click on them to make them active.  When you do this any clipped highlights will show up as red and clipped shadows will show up as blue.

Okay, now I'll take you through my start-to-finish process on an actual image from my last wedding. This is the image straight out of the camera.  (Canon 5D w/24mm f1.4L lens, no flash, ISO 1600, f2.2, 1/500 sec, +0 EC)

Step 1: Adjust white balance to taste. This image is slightly warm and magenta to my taste, so I moved the Temp slider to the left (from 4450 to 3754) and the Tint slider also to the left (from -2 to -11). Keep in mind that white balance is a matter of taste. Some photographers like slightly warm images, but I prefer mine to be on the neutral side.

Step 2: Next I adjust the white point (exposure). In this case, the image is a bit underexposed. I moved the exposure slider to the right a half-stop (+0.49). I would have liked to move the exposure even more, but the dress was completely blowing out and losing all detail. I know this because half the dress is covered with red blotches, showing highlight clipping. To bring back the dress detail, I had to also move the "recovery" slider to +30.  

Step 3: Set your black point. Here I moved the "blacks" slider to 6. This improves the contrast. At 6, I'm just starting to see a few blue blotches in the bride's hair. That's fine. If you don't see any blue blotches at all, that means you have no true blacks in your image, and it probably looks washed-out.

Step 4: I'm going slightly out of order here. In this step I went down to the "Tone Curve" box and switched the curve from "linear" to "medium contrast". This gives the curve a slight "S" shape and adds contrast to the image. In reality, my normal pre-set I use when importing images into Lightroom already does this for me.

Step 5: Give the image a final tweak using the brightness and contrast sliders. The exposure slider is the one that should do the heavy lifting regarding the brightness of your image. The brightness slider is puts on the final touch. It primarily adjuts the mid tones.

Step 6: For portraits I usually apply a bit of a vignette to focus the attention on my subject. It always cracks me up on internet forums when posters review lenses and complain about vignetting. I add vignetting to most of my images! Anyway, vignetting controls are in the "lens corrections" box:

Step 7: Sharpen. I sharpen with a Photoshop action that I run when I export the images from Lightroom. I don't sharpen until I've corrected all of my images. Then when exporting them all I run a sharpening action as a droplet so I never have to physically open up the images in Photoshop. Saves a ton of time.

And here's the "before" image again for comparison:

That's it! The entire process takes me about 30-40 seconds. If your subject doesn't need extensive retouching, preparing the images for proofing might be all you ever need to do. Sometimes I've prepared an image in Lightroom, then later given it the full Monty in Photoshop - only to find that I prefered the original, clean proof! Your proofs should look better than any images your client has ever seen - then be prepared to totally blow them away when they see their images in their fully-Photoshopped goodness!