Wedding Layouts – The Ceremony

Below are the pages I designed for the ceremony and the formal portrait shots.

After I cropped the top off of the photo of empty church the lighting from the skylights looked a lot more dramatic.

I darkened the edges of the photo on the left using the burn tool.

Making photo backgrounds can be very easy. For this background I simply changed the opacity of the photo in the layers tab.

I wanted to include our vows but I didn’t want it to distract from the photos so I wrapped it around a photo like a border.

I really loved the photo on the right that the photographer caught right after we walked back down the aisle so I gave it a bluish tint (see below to learn how to do this). On the left side I created a layout with smaller photos because two of the photos were blurry but I really liked them. In the actual album you have to really look hard to see that they aren’t in focus.

I deleted the background of the photo in the bottom left so that it would fade into the background like the photo in the bottom right.

Gotta keep my identity secret so you can’t know our family names.

One side of our family is so big we had a hard time getting everyone in one picture so I used some non-professional photos. They aren’t as good but at least you can see everyone’s face!

 

Using Gradient Maps (in 5 steps)

1.) After opening your picture click on the 1/2 black 1/2 white circle on the bottom of the layer palette (the create new or fill adjustment layer button). While clicking the button select the gradient map from the list.

2.) Next, change the blending mode (the pull down list at the top of the layers palette). Change it from “Normal” to “Color.”

3.) That makes the picture a lot more recognizable.

4.) Now to change the color click on the gradient box on the gradient map layer. It will pull up a box called Gradient Map. Click on the colored box to pull up a box called Gradient Editor. Finally, click on the color stop (a small box the color of the gradient) to open the Color Picker. In the color picker you can pick a different color by either clicking on a color or by entering a RGB number. I used R:40, G:70, B:105 to get the muted blue.

5.) To fine tune the amount of color in the photo slide the small diamond shape. This changes the gradient half-way point. Usually, you want more white so that the picture doesn’t look to crazy.

The finished product. To get the blurred oval edge I just carefully deleted the picture using the eraser tool with a low hardness.