NER: Photo Editing

shanliann · October 2013

What programs do you all recommend for photo editing? Our photographer didn't edit any of our pictures so im going to attempt to do it myself.

Also can you guys recommend a program or what to do to a picture that is really blurry? Its the only one of me and one of my longest closest friends, and it must have been taken with a bad cell phone or something, I don't even remember, maybe it was just the lighting, either way its blurry and doesn't even print decent in a 4 X 6 Size and I'd love to be able to frame it.

Thanks in advance for your opinions!

manateehugger · October 2013

Have you asked your photographer about this yet? Those photos are most likely copyrighted, meaning they don't belong to you and you can't edit them.

Otherwise, I can't help you. Sorry.

shanliann · October 2013

Well first off, the quality is so terrible, no one would believe they were professional. I've printed a bunch several times at walmart, walgreens etc and never been asked for a copyright release so im guessing I can edit them myself.

HisGirlFriday13 · October 2013

Does your photographer's contract not specify that the photos will be edited? That seems unusual.

Regardless, there are a bunch of photo editing programmes out there. LightRoom is good, fairly cheap (about $99, I think), and pretty user-friendly. PhotoShop is the best, obvs, but it's really pricey and takes some getting used to.

If you do own the photos outright, and can edit them, I'd contact local community colleges or high schools; many of them have graphic design programmes and they'd probably be willing to edit the photos for free for the sake of experience and portfolio-building for their students.

lovesclimbing · October 2013

The best free photo editing program out there (that I'm aware of) is GIMP. http://www.gimp.org/

It's a bit confusing at first. It took me awhile (and my best friend standing there showing me the basics) to figure it out.

Of course, Photoshop is the gold standard but you pay for that.

For sharpening, Lightroom, which is part of the Adobe suite of products, is the best. It has a sharpening tool that Photoshop doesn't have - the ability to mask certain parts so only the edges get sharpened rather than the whole image. To read more about it, click here. http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-sharpen-image-edges-in-photoshop

How blurry are these photos? If they're just a little bit out of focus or whatever, that's somewhat simple to fix. However, lots of blur is going to be extremely difficult to fix, even in Lightroom or Photoshop.

shanliann said:

Well first off, the quality is so terrible, no one would believe they were professional. I've printed a bunch several times at walmart, walgreens etc and never been asked for a copyright release so im guessing I can edit them myself.

Walmart, walgreens etc. are probably not going to ask for a photo release. They don't care what they print, they're making money.

As PPs have mentioned, check the contract to see what all you're allowed to do with these photos. HisGirlFriday has a good suggestion, contact local high schools or colleges. I don't know that they'd do it for free, (I'm a college student myself) but probably for not too much.

Did you check this person's portfolio? Does he normally edit the photos he takes? If their photos are normally this bad, why did you choose this person to photograph your wedding? What does your contract say about editing and/or the quality of photos you expect to have?

Depending on what your contract says/what the rest of his portfolio looks like, I would go to this person and say that you expected your photos to be edited and be of a decent quality and that you want your money back or else you will be posting bad reviews all over the place.

shanliann · October 2013

@lovesclimbing thank you so much for all the help! I could probably write a novel on my hate, and unhappiness with the $%&*(^$%# photographer we had. I've tried more then once to sit down and compose a letter to him but I am still to angry to compose full thoughts. It just says all photos on dish with release. He claims he edited them but I am 500% positive he didn't touch them. As for the blurry picture, I think it was taken on someones cell phone, so it is probably just blurry and out of focus.

As far as walmart our walmart is super strick. I have always had to provide releases for printing, like our engagement pics and we had a caraciture done that I got the jpg file for and they threw a fit about that one to.

lovesclimbing · October 2013

shanliann said:

@lovesclimbing thank you so much for all the help! I could probably write a novel on my hate, and unhappiness with the $%&*(^$%# photographer we had. I've tried more then once to sit down and compose a letter to him but I am still to angry to compose full thoughts. It just says all photos on dish with release. He claims he edited them but I am 500% positive he didn't touch them. As for the blurry picture, I think it was taken on someones cell phone, so it is probably just blurry and out of focus.

As far as walmart our walmart is super strick. I have always had to provide releases for printing, like our engagement pics and we had a caraciture done that I got the jpg file for and they threw a fit about that one to.

OK. Well, if you have a release, you should be able to do pretty much anything. Although, it does kind of depend. Sometimes, you just have authority to print them but they still don't want you to edit. It all depends on the photographer.

Yea, I haven't done a ton of printing at Walmart or other places so I'm no expert on that.

Also, it is possible he edited them and you can't tell. Different photographers do different things. Some photographers just do basic adding more contrast or saturating colors or sharpening while others actually soften skin and remove red marks and do all kinds of effects. So it's possible he does very minimal edits. (Not justifying that if you thought you were going to get more, just saying it's possible he's not lying.)

If you want, you could always send me the particular photo of you and your friend and I could tell you if it's even possible to get it to a sufficient level of sharpness. I'm no expert - I'm a Journalism student so I've taken some basic photography classes and messed around on my own as well, but I could at least tell you if a really good professional could get it to a level where it would be printable. I think you can send photographs via PM.

cowgirl8238 · October 2013

I have to ask, how bad is bad? Are we talking horrible quality where everything is over exposed or too dark or whatever, or are we talking he was pretty good but didn't do enough to edit the photos. Did he have a portfolio for you to look at before you hired him? Was this portfolio of far better quality then what you received? I just ask not to be mean but I am trying to gauge how angry one should be in this situation.

If his work is really bad and is of much lower quality then his portfolio, I would try google searching for letters. If you are having a tough time writting your toughts this should give you a good starting point. Then just fill in your sepcific details and point to as many specific things it takes to prove your point. There is no excuss for a vendor who is being paid good money to give you something that is significantly sub-standard. Just try to do this soon. Once you get a response you can gauge if there should be a refund involved and then go and leave honest reviews everywhere you can...just please try to work things out before you blast your photographer!

ashleyep · October 2013

Light-room is best for first pass editing - fixing exposure, saturation, sharpening, etc. You can do photos in batch with this too.

Photoshop is good for retouching - removing stray hairs, acne, etc.

itzMS · October 2013

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is the poster who didn't hire a real photographer (got the photos as an add-on to the DJ package).

I'm on mobile, so I can't search post history.

Bad photographer=bad photos.

Like putting lipstick on a pig...

ashleyep · October 2013

@itzMs - you're right.

http://forums.theknot.com/discussion/995578/major-disapointment-with-wedding-photographer-what-to-do

marshmallow1982 · October 2013

Did you ever make a complaint? Try to get at least a partial refund and then you could use that to get a pro to edit them

manateehugger · October 2013

FYI - a print release does not give you full rights to the photographs, it just means you can print them as many times as you want. It doesn't necessarily mean you can alter the photos themselves.

16maybeless · October 2013

I'm a photographer and photo editor for work, and I have some concerns about what you want to do.

First of all, what kinds of photo files do you have and how big are they? Can you get the raw files? What did the photog give you?

Secondly, what exactly do you want to edit? You won't be able to fix the composition or subjects, so if you're unhappy about the way your photos are posed or the backgrounds, that can't be fixed easily. Nor can photos be made much sharper if they're out of focus, as you say (even Photoshop's smart sharpen tool has limitations and really can only be used to sharpen photos 10-15% at a go). What exactly do you dislike?

What can be fixed is lighting, saturation, some blemish removal, etc. If you're savvy, you can also lasso tool/fill content aware people out of photos, so I know, for instance, you have a shot where your photog appears in the mirror, and he can be removed, with some technique.

But it would help to know what you want to edit.

Anyhow, I would recommend Lightroom, which is pretty inexpensive ($79ish?) or Photoshop Elements. I use the full version of Photoshop CS6 and it's really quite complicated. I wouldn't recommend spending thousands of dollars on it (or the entire Adobe suite). I don't personally like Gimp because it can corrupt photo files.

shanliann · October 2013

Thank you all. As far as what I want to edit, Im not 100% sure until I really dig in. I know there is a picture of me, moh and her mom. well we are not centered at all. we are basically all the way to the right and there is a big open space on the left. I am putting it in a 2 picture frame and the other picture in he frame is for the most part centered which only makes the offer centered picture look worse. So i'd like to do something with cropping out the blank background area. i'd also like some of our pictures in black and white, where we can just keep the color on 1 item, like flowers etc. That was something we requested and never got.

Also, we technically don't even have a release. Our contract says we paid for a disc and photo release and all I got in the mail was a disc. but again, the quality is so bad, no one would ever think these are professional pictures.

The blurry-ness in the 1 picture, it wasn't taken from the photographer it was from a friends cell phone or point and shoot camera.

PrettyGirlLost · October 2013

Some of the old timers might get this reference:

http://www.crushable.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Kim-Kardashian-Mermaids.gif

lovesclimbing · October 2013

shanliann said:

Thank you all. As far as what I want to edit, Im not 100% sure until I really dig in. I know there is a picture of me, moh and her mom. well we are not centered at all. we are basically all the way to the right and there is a big open space on the left. I am putting it in a 2 picture frame and the other picture in he frame is for the most part centered which only makes the offer centered picture look worse. So i'd like to do something with cropping out the blank background area. i'd also like some of our pictures in black and white, where we can just keep the color on 1 item, like flowers etc. That was something we requested and never got.

Also, we technically don't even have a release. Our contract says we paid for a disc and photo release and all I got in the mail was a disc. but again, the quality is so bad, no one would ever think these are professional pictures.

The blurry-ness in the 1 picture, it wasn't taken from the photographer it was from a friends cell phone or point and shoot camera.

Cropping and making pictures into black and white are both pretty easy to do. You could do that with the basic Windows Photo Gallery that comes with windows computers.

However, I would ditto what @PDKH said. Getting rights to print is not the same as getting full control over the images to do whatever you want to them.

MuppetOverlord · October 2013

I skimmed through the comments.

Technically, they own the copyrights to their photos simply by taking them.

Personally, I would edit them for my personal use regardless and not care about whether I have permission to or not.

(I would leave that information out of the claim I file in civil court to get my money back for the services)

I have never been asked for releases from Wal-Mart.... I suggest using EZprints for pro-quality photos though. In either case, you simply load them up online and order them.

I'm not sure how much luck you're going to have in editing blurry photos with any software.

Good luck

NER: Photo Editing

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