Need Help editing this shot. Comments would also be great

This was my first wedding ever and I was very nervous about it. Just need a little help and a few suggestions on how everyone else would edit this pic. If you edit it, I would really like to know the steps of WHAT you did, not just the end result.

Well there are plenty of things you could do to improve it but to be honest unless you could do a good job of opening the grooms eyes i wouldn't bother.
Shame.

You might want to consider using fill flash in the future. It will help properly expose the subjects without blowing out the sky. Have you tried this shot in B&W? It might have a little more pop. 1st weddings are tough. Hang in there. At some point the scary thing flip to fun.

Jonny wrote in post #3618797
Well there are plenty of things you could do to improve it but to be honest unless you could do a good job of opening the grooms eyes i wouldn't bother.
Shame.

Is the guy a squinter? We've had weddings were the groom was squinting so hard the whole time - inside, outside, where ever. There are tricks to get his eyes open, but the vast majority of the candid photos, his eyes are squinting.

That's just how the groom is...Very squinty eyed. I actually have shots where they LOOK more closed than this BUT they aren't closed

Here is my edit:

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

A very easy way to fix this is:

1. Duplicate the background layer.
2. Set the blending mode of the duplicate to "Screen"
3. Lower the opacity to taste (in my case I did lower it to 80%)
4. Alt/Option-click on the "Add Vector Mask" icon in the Layer palette, so it becomes black.
5. Start painting in the layer mask with a white soft brush and bring out the couple (so they become brighter).
6. Merge the layers when pleased with the result.

The imag would be nice this way, but I went a bit further:
7. Duplicate the background layer again
8. Add a Gaussian Blur of about 3 pixels (on this small image, you need more on a full res image - maybe 10 pixels or 15).
9. Set the blending mode of the duplicated (blurry) layer to "Soft Light"
10. Lower the opacity to about 50%, this will give the image a bit more punch.

I did also adjust some grey skin tones and a bit of red in his face, but that's for lesson #2.

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

Great edit Petra!

Oh, and a piece of advice - timing is everything - and so is backgrounds. Place yourself in a position where the background is the least obstructive (you might have done that already - but I find the grey structure to the right and the person behind him being a bit obstructive).

See, it was very hard to move around at this place... It was a small dock that is surrounded by water on three sides. It was small too, probabley about 40 feet long and 30 feet wide. It was a really weird setup

CyberPet wrote in post #3619362
Oh, and a piece of advice - timing is everything - and so is backgrounds. Place yourself in a position where the background is the least obstructive (you might have done that already - but I find the grey structure to the right and the person behind him being a bit obstructive).

Plus, the bride looks like she's had her head impaled by that beam behind her.
I'd have tried to have found a neutral background if possible, & shot with large aperture to get Bokeh thing ??

You're welcome!

Petra's work was really nice. The reason I am posting this version is only to suggest cropping. You could also clone out the tree trunks.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

Ok, I just bought a book off of amazon about CS2 which is what I have started using... But in the mean time, what are the propper steps in "cloning"something out?

I have taken classes at the local community college to learn photoshop (I have cs2). Longterm, you might consider that. In the meantime, you could try doing a search on google for clone stamp tutorials or techniques.
Betterphoto.com offers online photoshop classes, and I know there are other websites that have classes, which you could search for.
I am also a member of NAPP, which has a website with tutorials, books for sale, a monthly photoshop magazine, etc. They also sponsor 1 day classes in many cities. Their url is www.photoshopuser.com
Good luck!