1/100, f/5.0, ISO 2000, 15mm fisheye Step #1 – Import and backup (1-3 hours) I first import all images (1500-2000) via Lightroom into a folder (titled bride’s name and groom’s name, in alphabetical order) on my. I work on the go a lot, and I am often editing in a coffee shop, friend’s place or co-working space, so I have my 13 inch Macbook Pro (retina display) and portable drive to work from. The drive currently holds about six months of images, or 80,000 photos. I have a big gripe about people who organize their photos by date. In my opinion, it’s a terrible system when it comes to finding photos at a later date. When your bride Tiffany asks for a change in a photo from color to black and white, how do you find that folder with her wedding?

On my drive it would be under “Weddings,” and in a subfolder titled “Jeremy & Tiffany.”. 1/400, f/6.3, ISO 2500, on a Canon 135mm f/2 While my images are uploading I will be posting a Facebook album of the same day slideshow that I produced at the wedding, and tagging the bride and groom in it. This is usually 30-50 images that I’ve edited during dinner or during any sort of down time, like the end of cocktail hour.

Note: This means I have already added the bride and/or groom on Facebook, which is standard practice for me. Being friends with my clients is probably one of the greatest perks of my job, and it also guarantees tons of referrals. I have a competitive side that always wants to post the pictures faster and better than any friend, uncle or cousin at the wedding. Whoever posts first on Facebook will get the most attention. 1/400, f/2.5, ISO 400 with the Canon 135mm f/2 Step #2 – Culling (30 min an hour) In Lightroom I go through all 1500-2000 photos and select every photo that looks good, unique, and usable.

Although most wedding photographers use Adobe Lightroom to manage and retouch their photos. Photo Editing. Photoshop Tutorial: 3 Useful Wedding.

I use the, by pressing the “1” key on the photos I like. I usually end up with about 800 photos after this. If you focus and know what you are looking for, this should only take about 30 minutes to an hour, maximum. No agonizing over which photo is best between two very similar ones. Just trust your gut and go.

One “trick” I’ve unconsciously been doing is usually selecting the last photo in a series of similar photos. If you’re like me, you take two or three photos of each thing you are photographing. I move on when I think I’ve got it, and that means the second or third photo in a series should be my selection. To get photos like these, I usually have the guys grouped together in a friendly way, and then I tell them to “harass the groom.” Next I go through and do my two-star selects.

These are the best photos from the day that tell a clear story from beginning to end. They are images that would likely end up in a photo album (besides family photos). I almost always end up with 100 photos, give or take a few. This should take about 10-15 minutes, since you are selecting from a much narrower field of photos. Also, you really have to trust your gut on which photos are winners here. Step #3 – Editing and retouching (three hours) After I’ve selected my favorites, I edit them first.

I actually enjoy editing these ones, because I am proudest of them, and they are all different. I edit everything in Lightroom. I never open photoshop unless I’m making a diptych or doing heavy changes to a photo. Sometimes I start with a base preset in Lightroom, one I called “Typical Phil.” I hand edit all of these photos. This should take about an hour or two tops. These are then exported at 2500px, 300dpi, 88 quality, (and also renamed Highlights-0001.jpg, Highlights-0002.jpg, etc.), into a folder called Highlights which has been created inside the the main folder of images.

I upload the Highlights into a gallery, and deliver this immediately, so the clients don’t have to wait any longer to see some of their wedding images. Never spend more than 30 seconds on a photo. If you do, you are editing for yourself and other photographers, not the client. Most clients won’t be able to tell the difference between good, great, and perfect. Aim for great. My export settings make each of my images only about one or two megabytes in size, but they are able to be printed up to 11×14″. Anything larger and I’m happy to provide a specific file to my client directly.

I do this in the interest of hard drive and cloud storage space. Also, clients are usually only printing at most one or two photos extra large, so I don’t see the need to make every photo 30 inches on the long edge. PASS is a phenomenal application that is incredibly intuitive and easy to use for delivering digital photos to clients. Is another popular competitor. PASS charges per album of photos; Pixieset charges for bandwith/storage.

This next part is the secret to my rapid editing and turnaround of images. Take each of the favorite images that you’ve edited (two-star images), and copy each edit onto surrounding photos with a similar light source. If your exposure is consistent in this range of photos, the edit you do for one image should look great for every other image in that scene. This should take about two hours straight through. Lightroom speed tip Here is a Lightroom secret to make the copying and deselecting of images extra fast. With your main image selected, hold down Command and select all the other images you want to copy the edit to. In Develop mode, hold down the option key and press sync.

This automatically copies the edit onto all the other photos (to make sure you are copying the appropriate edits across all photos, you can simply press sync and a dialogue box will pop up showing which edits are going to be copied). Now that the edits are synced, you can deselect each image and check for consistency by pressing “/” which is the shortcut for deselecting the current image. I do this to make sure I’ve seen and checked each image for perfect exposure. Remember, you’re not retouching every face, every sky, every element of a picture. You can spend a little more time doing that on the favorites, but chances are your couple isn’t going to be printing every single photo from their wedding, so why are you retouching random shots from the reception?

Step #4 – Exporting (45 minutes) Export all images from each section of the wedding into their own folders. Folders and images can be named according to which part of the wedding they belong to (Getting Ready or Pre-Ceremony, Ceremony, Family, etc.). These can all be exported with these settings: 88 Quality, 2500 px long edge, 300dpi. This should take about ten minutes to start doing, and maybe an hour for the computer to finish (depending on number of images and your computer’s power and speed). Step #5 – Uploading (one hour) Upload all your files to your photo sharing service of choice (PASS, Pixieset, Zenfolio, Pixifi, etc.). Ideally, the first gallery that a viewer will see is the Favorites, or Highlights gallery. No need to overwhelm them with every photo from the Getting Ready series.

Your top 50-100 photos makes for an. That should take about 10-30 minutes (up to an hour or so), depending on how fast your internet connection is.

Step #6 – Delivery (10 minutes) Email the bride/groom the following: “Hi! How is everything going? I know I said it would be a couple of weeks until the photos are finished, but I have good news for you! I’ve finished and edited ALL the photos and they are ready for you to. Simply click on the download button to create a zip file with all of the high resolution images to your computer.

This will save you time having to wait for me to mail you a disk or thumb drive, which would have all the exact same files in it. As a special surprise, I am gifting you $50 of print credit! Simply put in “bridegroomname” in the checkout section of ordering prints under coupon code. This should buy you up to X amount of 8×10’s, or X amount of 5×7’s. Let me know if you have any questions about anything! Enjoy the photos 🙂 -Phil” I recognize this doesn’t involve an in-person sales meeting, delivery of albums, or anything of that nature. This is simply the fastest way you can do business and work smart, not hard.

I regularly book weddings between $3000-4000 doing exactly this. I have sold wedding albums, and that’s room for more profit, but also more headache and work.

Write to me and I’ll let you know how to make album making a painless, quick process as well. It’s all about guiding your clients’ expectations. Do you have any other workflow tips for weddings?

Is a great tool for wedding. It has made the editing process so much faster and allows me to give clients more images to choose from. Developing a workflow is essential to limiting how much time you spent in front of the computer and the quality of images you can output in that time.

The top file is the untouched RAW file. The bottom was run through a batch edit in Lightroom. Everyone has a different workflow for editing a large batch of photos — this is what mine looks like. Time sync If I am using several cameras for one wedding or shooting with other photographers, I will first make sure that our cameras are all time synced. When a digital camera takes an image, it gives it a time stamp. When you import photos into Lightroom, it will automatically sort them by time.

Batch editing is much easier when you have the option to view all your images chronologically. Import photos After the wedding, I use a card reader to pull all the images onto my hard drive into one folder and label it “X Wedding RAW.” Some people import straight from their memory cards into Lightroom — this is just how I prefer to do it. I like having the photos on my desktop instead. Then I import the images into a new Lightroom catalog and give it time for the previews to render. Cull photos Once the photos are imported and rendered, I will go through and flag all the images I want to keep. You can flag images by pressing the “P” key. All the blurry photos, duplicate photos, or ones where people’s eyes are closed do not get flagged.

Only the images that I want to give to my client are flagged. While I’m culling the photos, I will give star ratings to the photos I really like.

Five star photos are ones that I’ll use for my portfolio or blog or recommend as prints to my clients. Sometimes I’ll give a photo four stars if I’m not sure I want to use it. Export as Catalog After I have chosen the photos I want to keep, I will select all of them and go to Edit >Export as Catalog. This new catalog gets saved to an external hard drive along with all the RAW images that I have flagged.

Once the export is finished, I throw away the old catalog and RAW images on my desktop. I don’t see a need to keep bad photos and waste storage space. Editing Now that I’m working in the new saved catalog, I can get to editing. My star ratings should still apply to the new catalog, so I start by choosing the Develop module and viewing and editing only the five-star photos. These are the ones that I’m really excited about and want to spend time on.

Many times, I’ll use presets that I have purchased or created myself to speed up the editing of these photos. Once the five-star photos are edited, I can go through and batch process the rest. First, I choose one of my already edited five-star images and then I shift-click on all the similar looking images.

The edits apply to all when you select “Sync Settings.” Always batch edit when you can — it just doesn’t make sense to manually change the settings for every photo, especially when many of the shots are very similar. Before and After 6. Create collections and export Once all my edits are complete, I will select all the photos and create a new collection. I name this collection “Color.” Then, I select all the images again and create a new collection.

I name this one “Black & White.” I then choose one image and convert it to black and white. Next, I shift-click the rest of the images and sync just that one setting for B&W. After that, I choose the Color collection, select all the images and hit File >Export. I choose JPEGs at full size.

Lastly, I do the same thing for the Black & White collection. Once the images are exported, I have a set of color and a set of black and white images for my wedding clients.