A professional wedding photographer charges anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000, sometimes even more.
I’m not trying to put them down. A lot of these photographers do a very good job. But if you’re on a budget, $3,000 is a lot money.
But don’t fear, with some patience’s and willingness to learn you can have that same $3,000 professional wedding album look for around $600 or less. Here’s how we did it.
It turns out that my husband is very talented with photoshop. Most people are familiar with photoshop and if you’re not it’s not that hard to learn. All you need is to know is the basics.
First find a friend, family member or even a neighbor that loves taking pictures. We found a friend who loves taking pictures and had a good eye for taking action shots. He of course had a very good digital camera. We paid him $200 for 4 hours and he took around 900 beautiful pictures (if you’re lucky you might find a friend who’ll do it for free). At the end of the wedding, he gave us the memory card from the camera which we of course paid for.
After the honeymoon my husband got to work on the photos. He did a beautiful job editing the wedding pictures. First thing he did was to crop the wedding pictures. It’s amazing that by just cutting out certain parts of a picture it gives it a whole new look. To some of the other pictures he added some blur to the background and others he made them black and white.
Once the pictures were edited we made an album for our parents through Kodak. Each album cost us about $50 and they came out great.
For us, we used Somerset Albums for that beautiful professional look. When we where done, we paid just a little under $500 for our wedding album. The albums are beautiful, all leather bound. Besides saving money, one of the great things about doing it yourself is the freedom in arranging the album the way you want it.
With a little patience and creativity you can save over $1,000 or more on you wedding pictures and album. Below are some samples of the albums and some of our edited pictures:
These are samples of some of the albums available.
My husband added a black and white style to this photo making it look like it was taken in the 30’s.
Originally this photo was to bright. Our faces were to orange. Again my talented hubby used photoshop and fixed the colors. By the way that’s not a fake back drop. That is a real sunset.
Everyone who sees our album thinks that we spent at least $2,000.
There you have it. We did it, so can you. Take your time. There is no rush. Sometimes couples think that they need their album and pictures the very next day and that’s when you make desperate decisions and waste money.
Below are some links on tutorials and tips on how to crop, blur and change your pictures to black and white:
http://www.digital-photography-tips.net/digital-wedding-photography-tip.html
http://lifehacker.com/software/image-editing/add-a-dash-of-color-to-black+and+white-photos-223182.php
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/index.php?m=show&id=251
Let us hear some of your stories with your wedding pictures. Leave a comment below.
We’ll talk later
Aimee
P.S. If you enjoyed this short little article then I hope you will share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter (it’s that green button on the top right of this post).
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[...] fit your budget. One of the most important objects that should not be absent during a wedding is a wedding album. Though it may be true that there are a lot of albums to choose from that are sold in your local [...]