Start with blurry wedding portraits, end up with half decent photos

These two are sisters. Ellie on the right and Shannon on the left, both Incredibly Photogenic, it’s almost impossible to take a rough photo of them, although I have on this occasion.

Just goes to show that it’t not always easy to get perfectly sharp focus when you are doing candid shots. It doesn’t help that my lens, on this occasion was a huge 400mm with F5.6. So the light was gloomy anyway, and the shot was taken at maximum zoom, so a combination of poor light, not so good quality lens and no tripod ended up in some average shots.

Have done some Photoshop work on both, for Ellie it was to try to disguise the fact that she was alot out of focus. Also, irritatingly, the images were cropped quite a lot, as there were so many other people around, hence I have had to enlarge these a fair bit, which has not helped with the sharpness. But hey ho, the content is king, quality is Queen.

Nothing to strenuous. Both I applied some Unsharp Masking. Just because.

Then.

Simply went to ‘Channels’ and copied the single Red channel and pasted it on it’s own layer. All I did then was to set the Layer to ‘Overlay’, which creates this bleached porcelain look.

Which ultimately means I can just about get away with not having her properly in focus and cheekily call it a soft focus shot!

I also use this simple technique for images that are ‘in focus’ as I am in love with the results. You may notice that a lot of my pictures all though not 100% Black and White, are very de-saturated.

A hint of colour is all you need to get away from the sometimes drab world of Black and White.

So ending up with a relatively nice shot from what was a pretty awful looking mess. When the content or subject matter is good, but the quality is lacking, you can still rescue the image by tinkering.