I spent a whole weekend trying to fix a batch of photos

The trap of wanting everything perfect

I really thought I could handle the wedding photos myself. My cousin got married last spring, and the professional photographer sent over hundreds of RAW files. They were good, but there was this nagging feeling that the skin tones were just a bit too yellow, or that the background in some shots looked cluttered. I figured, I have a decent laptop and some time, so why pay a private editing service? I started looking at prices—some places charge around 5,000 to 10,000 KRW per photo for high-end retouching—and thought, multiply that by fifty photos and it’s a waste of money. I can just watch a few tutorials and figure out the basics of color grading.

Getting lost in the shadows and highlights

It sounded simple when I read about it online. Just adjust the highlights and the shadows. I spent Saturday morning opening up the software, tweaking the sliders for brightness and contrast. The first five photos actually looked okay. But then I hit a wall with the lighting. Some shots were taken in a dark reception hall, and others were outside in harsh sunlight. When I tried to match the color temperature, I ended up with photos that looked like they were taken on different planets. I spent two hours just trying to get rid of a stray waiter in the background of one shot. I kept staring at the pixels, zooming in until my eyes ached, and eventually, I couldn’t tell if the photo looked better or worse than the original. The software was fine, but my eyes had lost the ability to be objective.

The reality of amateur editing

There is a huge difference between fixing a photo and ‘correcting’ it for a professional look. I realized that my edits made the people look a bit plastic, almost like those AI camera assistants on some smartphones that sharpen everything to the point where it stops looking human. I tried to dial it back, but then the photos just looked flat and dull. I found myself comparing my work to the samples from a professional retouching company I had looked at earlier. Their version of ‘subtle’ was clearly a level of skill I didn’t have. I spent probably six hours on ten photos. At this rate, I’d be working on this for three weeks.

Why I gave up halfway through

By Sunday night, I was exhausted. The annoyance wasn’t the software; it was the realization that I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had a pile of photos that looked inconsistent—some were slightly over-saturated, others were too cool, and that background removal I attempted looked messy if you looked closely at the edges. I ended up just closing the program and walking away. I still haven’t finished the rest of the batch. It’s sitting there in a folder on my desktop, taking up space, and every time I see it, I feel this mild, unresolved frustration. Maybe I’ll go back to it, or maybe I’ll just pick the best three and be done with it. The time I invested far outweighed the cost of just paying someone else to do it in the first place, but there’s something about the process that makes it hard to just let go and hire a pro now.