Somehow I found myself doing a wedding shoot. How unqualified can I be, but in doing this, I’ve discovered I need quite a few more special effects and so here is the search:

  1. Sepia and Black & White. A trick that many folks use that can make people look way better is to go to Sepia. But you need to find the right filter for this. I tried just using the default in DxO and that doesn’t look good. Photoshop has a mode for this as well
  2. Background blur. I didn’t have the right lense all the time, so it would be really helpful to put in a shallow depth of field when needed. Seems like a filter is needed for this. Photoshop has Smart Blur so I’ll give that a try to get rid of distracting backgrounds (like people wandering around). And there is something called Lens Blur as well that imitates the shallow depth of field effect. Turns out how things look when blurred is called Bokeh and worth a whole article to talk about the various effects.
  3. Smooth skin. Ok, this is a bit of a cheat, but how do you make folks blemishes disappear. Seems like another need for a Photoshop effect or maybe they already have this one.
  4. Crop. Pretty important to use the rule of thirds and not put people directly in the middle of a shot.

Fortunately, red eye isn’t a problem and I’ve been trying to shoot in available light, so little in the way of harsh flash effects and DxO does a pretty good job of HDR to bring out things that are in shadows and so forth.

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