The Sanadas -California Wedding Photographers » Malibu California Husband and Wife Wedding Photographers

FAQ: Edited vs. Non-Edited Images

A question that a lot of couples ask us when we first meet is whether all of the photos they will be receiving will be edited. This is a great question to ask your photographer since some photographers only edit some of their images and what you see online may have much more work done to it than what you will receive on your USB.

So what the question boils down to is “Marianne + Joe, what will the images look like on our USB?”

Great question! So glad you asked! :)

The short answer is that you will get the same quality of photos on your USB that you see on our blog and website. We don’t do anything extra special to our blog photos and they are representative of what we delivered to our clients.

The long answer involves a quick look at our editing work-flow:

Step 1. We show up to your beautiful wedding (and/or engagement session) and take a LOT of photos (we shoot digital, so it is not like we are going to run out of film!), have a good time, share some laughs, do some photo acrobatics then go home and soak our tootsies in a bath. This step (the photos, not the bath. :) ) is the most important because it is our goal to get as close as possible to the final image right in our cameras.

Step 2. We narrow down those images to somewhere between 700 and 900 images for weddings and 100-200 for engagements. We do that by taking out all of the photos where people are blinking or blurry, taking out our test shots, and taking out duplicate photos.

Step 3. From there we do basic color correcting to all of your images. This includes minor adjustments to exposures, white balance, contrast, small color casts and conversion of about 20-35% of the photos to black and white and, of course, making your images pop with that Marianne + Joe flair. The majority of your disc of images and our blog images are edited in this fashion.

Step 4. Sometimes we do a very small amount of skin retouching on close-up photos of faces where a blemish is really noticeable. But, we are super careful not to overdo it! Too much skin retouching can make a person’s skin look like plastic and we want to make sure that your photos look like you!

Step. 5 We upload your images as proof sized jpegs for viewing in your password protected gallery site then e-mail you all the good info about how to login and order any photos you would like prints of. Go ahead and share the link/password with family and friends! They are dying to see your photos too!

Step. 6 Within 3 to 5 weeks from the shoot we will copy your images on to a USB Flashdrive as full resolution jpegs (300dpi) optimized for prints, personally package them and send them out for you to enjoy!

Our main goal is always to start with a good solid image and do small tweaks from there. We would much rather start with good images and adjust them to make them great than have to start with a mediocre image and make it… well… still mediocre but “good enough.”

Here are a few examples of our straight out of camera shots as compared with the shots that we delivered to our clients: