Photography terms that all brides should know.

Spot color

This is when you convert a picture to black and white but leave some parts of the pictures in color, such a the bouquet or the bride’s eyes. Only looks good rarely in my opinion.

Black and white

All digital files can be converted into beautiful Black and White images. In fact, when the light is mixed (different colors like a mixture of daylight and tungstun light) a conversion to Black and White will look much better than the color version.

Duotone

This is where you use another color other than Black in a Black and White. A duotone can be brown and white (sepia tone), blue and white, green and white, ect.

borders

A lot of photographers design coffee table books with unique borders around the pictures. A current favorite is sloppy borders which can mimic natural effects such as Polaroid film.

drop shadow

Adding a drop shadow to a picture in a coffee table book makes it look like a print is just laying on the surface of the book and can look very cool.

High Res (high resolution)

Any professional photographer who gives you high res files should be giving you a file that will make a flawless 11×14 print or better. It should not be an interpolated file (which means using photoshop or another program to add information to a file to make that file larger. It is like talking a wallet sized picture and blowing it up to an 8×10. Yes it will be bigger but it will look like crap.) It should be the largest size file the camera is capable of taking.

Michael Steinberg