Photographers often like to fetishise the camera and deny that they do any post-production. I call it the Magnum school of photography which owes its philosophy to Cartier Bresson and the early Leica photographers who just liked to capture the moment unchanged. As wedding photographers, our job is to tell a story and create a memory. I don't like to push things too far, but I also want to produce the picture I want (and my clients want). This means post production in Lightroom and sometimes also Photoshop to get the light right.

Here is an example of the original picture (SOOC)...

of a little girl who had been running around the party, having a lot of fun. She was not very willing to have her picture taken really, but once I had shusshed her a little I managed to get a couple of shots of her. They turned out pretty nice and very sweet. Lighting was good but the face was maybe a little soft.

Viewing the picture, I felt that the lighting was strong enough to increase the impact of the picture by getting rid of extraneous colour and detail so we can focus on her. So some tweeking with levels, colour etc in Lightroom and we got to this below.