No matter how late in the evening, we will always download the pictures to check them out because we are just way too excited and cannot wait to see them! What can I say…we love pictures. After the pictures are downloaded to the computer, we immediately back them up to another hard drive and burn two separate copies on DVDs. That’s a lot of work, but we can’t imagine anything worse than losing your wedding pictures.

Next day or the day after, or whenever we are coherent enough, we will go through the thousands of pictures we took and keep the good ones — that usually takes a good 2-3 hours. We have to make sure the pictures are good enough out of the camera, otherwise we just throw them away. We want to do this step as soon as we can because afterwards we get to pick out pictures for the blog!! We know how much you all love the blog!!! Depending on the number of pictures…retouching the blog pictures could take us anywhere from 2-3 hours. We know that’s extra work we don’t have to do, but we really enjoy it since it’s so much fun. You know me, I like to show off our good work

About two weeks after the wedding, we will starting working on putting the proofs online. It takes another 2-3 hours do that; we have to double check every picture to make sure everything looks okay and are all in the right categories for you to view online. Then we pull out the email list that was filled out at the wedding and enter each one of them by hand so the couple and their families and friends get to look at them and go, “Wooo!” and “Awww!” and hopefully order a lot of pictures Depending on when the couples pick out their favorite pictures, we can then start designing the album and retouching the pictures. Album design is a whole other topic, so we’ll save that for later.

Retouching is THE major thing we do during post production. This is the most time-consuming step and that’s why it takes a while for us to deliver those albums to you all (we really appreciate your patience). We’d like to show you some examples of “Before and After” photoshop. I really like doing this because it really shows the differences. Even if the pictures are good enough straight out of the camera, they can always be touched up to be nearly perfect. This is where experience comes in to help us make it happen and it is also where we add our Serendipity flavor to the pictures.

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We got back to Texas on Friday but had already met with 6 lovely brides throughout the weekend. Whew! We asked the brides whether we looked tired; they didn’t seem to think so. We hid it well I guess because we could’ve fallen asleep at any given moment due to jet lag.

During one of the meetings we got a very good question and I wanted to share it with everyone. The question was “How come you don’t give us your retouched negatives with every custom print order?” The best way I know to answer that is to give you a couple analogies. When you go to a nice restaurant to order your favorite dish, do you ask the chef to give you the recipe? No way right? How about when you buy a poster to hang on your wall? They surely are not going to give you the computer file so you can make multiple copies of it. Same thing with photography. A photographer invests a lot of time and money to make that perfect picture for you, it would be insane for him to give out the retouched negative. However, since we do give you the unretouched negatives for your personal use for a low price, don’t you think we are already very nice?

Here are some examples of original pictures vs. retouched versions to help you see why we charge a premium for the prints we sell.

Sometimes we only have split seconds to catch a moment, the exposure isn’t always perfect. This one came out a little dark.


After adjusting the tone curve, contrast, saturation, sharpness, and applying a TRA, look what happens!


The exposure is pretty good on this one.

But this is A LOT better!

I like this one a lot already. The composition is very good and it really tells the story.

Thanks to Becker’s B&W and and some sharpening, the picture now wants to jump out and say, “Look at me!!”

Pretty girls

Sharpen, saturation, and TRA was used on this one. A little vignetting also helps to get rid of some of the distractions on the right side. Even prettier now!

This is my favorite example.

What a big difference!