After a wedding we’ll deliver well over a thousand photos. The bulk of them - usually 500 to 700 - are delivered as the cameras saw them, unedited but selected. On top of that, we hand-pick the strongest 300–400 (the exact number depends on your package) and edit each one. Many of those are also retouched in detail.
But what does “edited” actually mean?
Most wedding venues, churches and halls don’t have ideal lighting. The light is sparse and oddly coloured. Your eyes adapt to it without you noticing, but a camera doesn’t - faces end up dark, with a yellow or orange cast. When we edit, we fix that. We adjust exposure, balance the colours, crop for composition, and make the picture look the way the moment actually felt.
Retouching goes a layer deeper. It’s the work of removing distractions - an exit sign over someone’s shoulder, a smudge on the wall, the random bag in the corner of the room - so the photo feels finished:
For close-up portraits, retouching is also about skin: keeping it natural, but smoothing the things people would rather not see in print. Not changing how anyone looks - just letting their face speak first:
And every now and then, on the favourites, we let ourselves play a little:
Each edited photo we deliver has been worked on by hand. No presets, no batch jobs, no AI smoothing pass that turns everyone’s faces into wax. It’s slower work, which is part of why our gallery delivery time is around a month - but the difference shows.