Magazines Don’t Want to See Everything
Beware The Photoshop Buffet
On the other hand, be careful to not overwhelm the photo editors or magazine
In today’s world of Photoshop and plugin/action mania, its easy (and fun)
designers by giving them too much choice. If they have to sort through 20
to turn your photographs into art. Whether it’s adding traditional darkroom
variations of the bride’s bouquet, you have now added work to their day…no
techniques such as sepia toning, dodging & burning and vignetting, or more
more warm fuzzies. Unless the composition is significantly different, such as the
extreme changes such as selective colorization, quadrupling the size of the
bouquet on a very different colored background, or close-ups of individual
moon, or superimposing the bride and groom on the side of a skyscraper, the
flowers or details on the bouquet vs. the whole bouquet image, try to pare it
sky is the limit. However, for the purposes of getting published you must learn to
down to two orientations of each image. This doesn’t have to be absolute, if
restrain your creativity. Each magazine must remain true to their stylistic integrity,
one orientation isn’t working, don’t include it, but in general it’s pretty easy to
or their brand will be diluted or confused. You may think blue sepia toning is the
accomplish and doesn’t take much extra time.
greatest thing since sliced bread, but the magazines don’t want that, so don’t waste your time or theirs. Regular and light retouching is fine; just make sure
Don’t Be A Pain In The Neck
your photographs still look like photographs. Remember also that a magazine will often be looking to group images together from different photographers for
Don’t let your details (or people) fall out of the photo. What do we mean by
sections on cakes, favors or other detail categories, and they need the images
this? Avoid extreme angles. You can generally get away with more extreme
to go well together on the same page.
angles with detail photos than people photos, but for the purposes of magazine submissions it’s best to not push it too far. The magazines don’t want their readers to have to turn their magazines half sideways to view an image, and this point is even more important when it comes to online publishing.
Get the Color Right Speaking of images going well together, please take the time to color correct your images before submitting. The magazine is not your lab or Photoshop
Sharp, Soft or Just Right?
assistant. If they look at your photos and see unedited uncorrected images they will simply move on to the next submission. You are the photographer; it is your
There is a lot of confusion in the printing industry around both image sharpness
job to make the images look their best. If you are capturing in RAW format (you
and color spaces. Because of this, and to keep things simple, we recommend
should be), taking the time to photograph a grey card when shooting details will
that you use an appropriate amount of image sharpening in your workflow
save you pulling your hair out during color correction when trying to remember
so the images will print well in magazines (or on any media you use for that
exactly what shade of off-white that wedding dress was—and if you have
matter), but be careful to not over sharpen, whether by mistake or for creative
someone else doing your color correction then it is even more critical to have
effect. For color space, convert your images to sRGB if they are not already
this reference point.
in that color space. If you don’t have a good sharpening workflow, we highly recommend the folks over at Pixel Genius and their excellent PhotoKit Sharpener software and sharpening methodology.
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