How to Fix Bad Wedding Photos?

People hire professional photographers to capture beautiful and detailed pictures of their wedding. However, wedding pictures don’t always come out as perfect as expected; sometimes, even the most skilled photographers fail to capture your wedding moments flawlessly.

You may feel devastated if your wedding photos don’t turn out the way you wanted. Although you can’t have a wedding do-over, you can still figure out how to fix such blurry, dark, or un-openable photos.

This blog presents several ways to enhance your wedding photos and transform them into professional-looking photos.

How to fix Wedding Photos Gone Wrong?

First, you need to figure out all the bad aspects of the photos that you’d like to change. If you can narrow down different issues affecting your wedding photos, you may be able to resolve them. Let’s take a look at different scenarios where wedding photos come out wrong.

Issue 1: Blurry Images

Wedding is a long event. Sometimes, photographers tend to slack and end up taking bad photos. This can be due to bad camera holding techniques, missed focus, shaky hands, etc. affecting the output of your wedding photos.

In such a situation, you don’t need to discard your blurry pictures; rather, use Photoshop, Lightroom, or other editing software to fix blurry wedding photos. Most of these editing software have a Clarity tool that can remove blurriness from images.

Issue 2: Photos are too dark

There’s nothing worse than knowing some wedding pictures would have been perfect if they weren’t so dark. Your wedding photos turn out to be dark sometimes, when there is not enough lighting or when the object is close to a window or light source.

There are numerous ways to brighten dark pictures by using Photoshop and other photo editing software. You can use Photoshop’s Brightness/Contrast or Shadows/Highlight tools to make your dark wedding photos bright and well-exposed.

Issue 3: Invalid Image File Header on an Image

If your wedding images are unreadable and throw an error every time you open them in any image viewer, it can be due to a corrupt file header. The File Header includes the file name, image size, location, and other data of the image file. The image file header can get corrupted or invalid due to bad sectors in the storage drive, virus infection, OS crash, etc.

The best way to fix bad wedding photos due to invalid image file headers is using a professional tool like Stellar Repair for Photo. This tool uses an advanced algorithm to repair invalid, corrupted, or damaged file headers. Moreover, you can even try to open an image in another image editor and change the image format to see if it helps fix the invalid image header issue.

This photo repair software can repair corrupt, damaged, and distorted JPEG/JPG, HEIC, PNG and other photo formats. It even supports RAW file formats of popular camera brands like Canon, Nikon, and Sony, etc. This tool lets you Preview the repair photos before saving them to ensure that details of the original photo remain intact.

Issue 4: Noise in Photos

Noise means unwanted elements or visual distortion, like grainy veils or discoloration spots in wedding photos, can ruin an otherwise perfect picture. These noises can be caused either due to poor lighting conditions, high ISO settings, shutter speed of the camera, etc.

You can use the Detail and Smoothness slider in Lightroom to trim down the noise in the photographs. Alternatively, use other upbeat techniques of Lightroom, Blacks, and Dehaze slider to reduce image noise.

Issue 5: Bad Lighting in a Photo

If your wedding photographs have bad lighting, they will not showcase the object or subject as you intended. Don’t toss that image out just yet; you can try to fix bad lighting in the image by using Adobe Photoshop or other editing software. Apply Colorize Neural Filter or use Brush tool to make your picture Instagram-worthy!

Issue 6: Color Casts In Your Wedding Photos

Sometimes, in your professional wedding photographs, colors seem off. Maybe your wedding venue comes out orange in some pictures instead of pink. A color cast is a bothersome tint or wash of color that appears all or part of a digital photograph.

Use White Balance, Color correction, or Color grading tool of Photoshop or Afterlight to enhance or reduce the specific colors. You can even use the Photo Filter tool to neutralize the color cast or adjust the color curves in Photoshop to fix the color cast in digital pictures.

Issue 7: Low/ Bad Quality Photos

If you notice that your professional wedding pictures don’t come out as expected because of low-quality images, it may be unpleasant. Unfocused shots, resizing the image, camera errors, or shaky cameras may be the reason for bad wedding photos.

Use Photoshop’s Super Resolution and Resampling tool to elevate your photo quality. You can even use Paint.NET, Lightroom, PaintShop Pro, and GIMP Freeware tool for image correction without sacrificing the photo quality.

Issue 8: Photos Cannot Preview or Open

If you cannot preview or open your wedding photos on your Windows or Mac, it can be due to a corrupt app, system conflict, incompatible photo viewing application, or corrupted photos itself.

You can try updating the photo-viewing app or using a different application to open your pictures. You can even use photo repair tools like Stellar Repair for Photo to repair corruption in wedding images.

Conclusion

Wedding photography is a tricky job even for a photographer, as sometimes it can leave you wanting something completely different from what it actually is. If your wedding photos come out wrong, you can edit them however you like to make them a little better. There are tons of photo editing software that can be used to make those bad wedding photos picturesque.

FAQ

1. Is it possible to add missing details from wedding photos?

While some details, like color, shadows, highlights, etc., can be enhanced, adding elements like missing objects or people is not possible.

2. How can I preserve the original quality of the photos when editing?

You need to use high-resolution copies of the photos and save your edits in lossless formats, like RAW or TIFF, to maintain the quality of the pictures.

3. How can I remove distractions in the background of wedding pictures?

Use tools like the Clone Stamp or Healing brush in Photoshop to remove unwanted distractions from the pictures.  

4. What software can I use to edit bad wedding photos?

Use Photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to edit wedding pictures. You can even use apps like Snapseed and VSCO to do the same.

5. Can bad wedding photos be fixed?

Yes, various photo editing techniques and software can fix bad wedding photos.

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About The Author

Vishakha Singh

Vishakha Singh is a Senior Writer at Stellar Data Recovery with half a decade of experience in writing content in diverse verticals. She's a tech enthusiast who loves creating photo/video recovery & repair tutorials. Vishakha also specializes in writing full-blown iPhone and Android guides.