Wedding Layouts – The Art Session

These are the layouts I created for our wedding album for the wedding party and bride and groom outdoor portraits. They’re the fun ones. Libby, our photographer, called these shots our art session and she shot some really unique photos during this part of the day. But I have to say our end of the night session was pretty artsy too.

Hopefully, you are all enjoying the layouts I created for our wedding album. I’m putting them on here for three main reasons. One, when I was trying to find layout ideas for our album I had a hard time finding stuff that didn’t look like a 3rd grader could do it. Two, I’m trying to show how Photoshop can be affectively used in an album. Just because you can add a diagonal rainbow gradient overlay doesn’t mean you should. And third, I want to show off my hard work. : )

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Doesn’t it make me look hot?!

 

This is one of my favorite spreads. I love the relaxed smirks on the guys faces and the cool angle.

 

No one was allowed to smile…yes I was one of the those brides.

 

Our assasination shot.

 

This was my favorite picture so I didn’t want to distract from it by putting a different picture next to it.

 

This page is hilarious! Scroll down to see why.

 

This is another one of my favorite spreads because of the cut out I did. We are surprised here because Libby, our photographer, was pulling out an antique chair she had brought all the way from Milwaukee so we could take pictures in front of the old one room school house.

 

I got him this collapsible silk top hat for Christmas last year (he has a small top hat collection). It’s the Cadillac of top hats and made for some great pictures. Katie, Libby’s assistant, had to run past the school and around to the back of the church to get the top hat out of his truck for these pictures.

 

Our “mad” shot. The smaller pictures are us trying to both look mad.

 

This is my husband’s favorite shot of me from the wedding.

 

Don’t be afraid to use color and black and white shots on the same page.

 

We secretly took a few dance lessons so we wanted to practice before heading up to the reception.

 

Some of the Photoshopping for these pages

We had this great shot of the wedding party where everyone but Laura looked happy, she looked like she had started the drinking a little too early. So I took her face from a different picture and added it as another layer to the photo. To clean it up I deleted the edges with a soft edged low opacity eraser.

 

The final result.

 

I wanted to create a spread that was graphic and bold but didn’t feel out of place with the rest of the album. These photos were great candidates because they although they are nice they could use a little something plus they weren’t peoples faces. Going really graphic with people’s faces can be really neat high art but would be out of place with the rest of the book.

Before

 

After. I bumped up the contrast, brought back some of the details using Image>Adjustments>Levels, and increased the yellow & red under Image>Adjustments>Color Balance.

 

Then I deleted the branch in the top right hand corner so that I could make the white sky of the two pictures blend together.

 

I love the layout of this picture, but I needed it to match the other photo in the spread.

 

When I similarly increased the contrast a blue tint appeared over my dress and bouquet.

 

So I increased the yellow. But this made my already yellow looking bouquet (compared to the dress) look really yellow. So I went back to the original photo. Took the unaltered bouquet and put it over the yellow bouquet.

 

**Super Important Tip: Always, always keep at least one copy of the original picture. You can only “undo” so many times in Photoshop. If you learn anything from this blog let this be it.

 

I liked this shot because of the grass, the trees, and that we are off center.

 

So I changed the levels, darkened the edges of the picture with the burn tool, and took the sunburst from another photo to draw the eye up. I thought it made the photo nice and dramatic. But I did all this Photoshopping and missed something…

 

Katie, Libby’s assistant photographer, jumping behind us trying to get out of the shot! It was the first thing I noticed when I saw this page in the album. Looking at a little 5″ spread on your monitor and seeing the full 19×13″ spread in an actual album are two totally different things. That’s why this page is hilarious. Now Katie will be in our wedding album forever. I just know I’m going to be pointing out her white Irish leg to my grandkids.

 

The original picture of us being surprised. Cute but blah.

 

Quickly livened it up with a warm photo filter. Image>Adjustments>Photo Filter>Warm Filter (85) at a really low opacity

 

The background of the shot was boring. The doorway was the unique part so I cropped out the background.

 

But that sharp white corner where my dress was cut off was really bugging me so I decided to just let it overflow. Perfect. I carefully cleaned up the edges so that it didn’t have that weird blue screen look and wah-lah.

 

I liked this shot because we were trying to get people to stop clicking there glasses for us to kiss so we did a big dramatic kiss. I also really liked the candid nature of this shot and the look on peoples faces.

 

So I rotated and cropped the guy out of the photo as much as I could. Notice how the guy’s shoulder is up at a strange angle. Buy just doing those two simple steps I was able to salvage a great shot of us about to kiss.