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How can I reduce my time spent editing wedding images?
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Hi,
I am looking for a few tips please. Being relatively new to the business, to date I have shot a dozen weddings. On the day itself I am shooting from the Brides house right up until the first dance. On average I would shoot 1000 images throughout the day and would present the Bride and Groom with 300- 400 final images which would have been edited using Photoshop.
I have been reading on other online forums that some photographers are completing their editing in 2 or 3 hours but it is taking me on average 3 working days to reach completion! This got me to thinking are these guys getting the job done in a couple of hours either really good at photoshop? or are they just using the “process multiple files” function with no regard for the outcome in terms of quality?
Of course because I am quite new to having to process such large quantities of images its highly probable that I am processing my images the slowest way known to man and that I am unaware of some standard workflow carried out by seasoned pros. I am aware and observe the time honoured advice of “get it right in the camera and save hours at the editing” but even so I feel compelled to examine every image separately and at the very least tweak the contrast or sharpen it.
My general workflow is: Open Raw image; Adjust Blacks/recovery/exposure etc if necessary; Crop; adjust levels; adjust contrast; Sharpen; save.
In most cases all of these steps are not necessary but I still do them to see if it will enhace the image any. (OCD?) I always crop the image to 6″x4″ with a resolution of 300px. I do this to reduce the size of the file to around 1.5mb. Is this necessary? I would also experiment on alot of images to see if they look better in B&W etc. Of course if the bride or groom have a zit or or blemish etc I will correct this as well. And I do all this 300 – 400 times!So if anyone could advise me on how to speed up my process and therefore my productivity I would very much appreciate it. Many thanks. :)
You could use something like Adobe Lightroom, which can apply basic processing to all images in a batch.
It’s also good for batch cropping or cropping quickly.
Then for your final fine detail edits, just open the image in Photoshop.
Many pros would create a droplet in Photoshop for bulk quick processing, and then just do the fine detail processing. Automate as much as you can.
I think this would cut your workload from 3 to 1 day.
Paul thats excellent help. Thank you so much. Until now I always felt that Lightroom was very expensive and that photoshop could do anything I needed to do just as good as lightroom. But your excellent advice has made me realise that Lightroom could improve my productivity and therefore pay for itself in no time. Thanks again. :-)
You can download a full version of Lightroom to use free for 30 days. Worth trying.
If you already have Photoshop, you really don’t need to add lightroom, in my humble opinion, to speed up an editing workflow. If you shoot RAW and have an adequately powered PC or MAC, you can do all your image selections in Bridge, open in camera RAW and make quick adjustments to exposure, white balance etc. You can also do quick blemish fixes and if you have CS5, local area adjustments without having to open each file individually (which takes a lot of time).
I have edited many thousands of images and designed many storybook albums using just Photoshop. You just need to spend a little time getting to know how it works.
You can also edit Jpegs in Adobe Camera RAW, this works very well too if your jpegs are decent enough to start with.
Here’s some tips found on line, can’t remember where I got it but I emailed it to myself cos I thought it was good.
Especially the file managment stuff. In my opinion lightroom will save you hours! (50% off on adobe.com)
Happy reading.
g2tm~~~~~~~~~~~
Software:
– Fast Picture Viewer (incredibly fast culling)
– Photoshop
– Photographers shopping cart
– FileZilla ftp client – http://filezilla.sourceforge.net” onclick=”window.open(this.href);return false;Shooting/setup stuff:
– Synchronize the times of each camera
– Shoot RAW
– manual exposure
– I still use Av mode and partial metering for situations where the lighting changes more rapidly than I can meter manually.
-Sometimes I just use the histogram instead of the light meter.
-I never focus manually.Steps:
I do a first pass to do the initial cull, then I do a second pass to cull some more and do the color correction.1) Copy each card to a subfolder of the customers event folder on my hard drive. Manually check image counts and that file sizes aren’t 0.
Once verified copy all images to root of customers folder.3) Check to see all images are present. You can check using image numbers or visually, preferably both ways.
4) Change the sort order to by date modified and visually check the images are in the correct order. If they’re not change the sort order to by date.
5) Use the batch rename function to rename your images to something meaningful to you. I use a combination of the customer initials and initially a 4 digit number.
6 Fast Picture Viewer and cull the images.
– Hit the keys 1-5 to indicate how good the image is.
1=unusable for a technical reason,
2=duplicate image or not worth showing,
3=good image,
4=image that will probably go into an album,
5=image that will go into my portfolio.7) Open brige and use the filter panel to select images as follows.
Images I rated 1* are deleted immediately,
images I rated 2* are kept in case I need to do a head transplant or eye transplant (ie swap eyes/heads between pics). I rate duplicate images 2* and I rate quickly so I keep the dupes just in case I choose a blurry one or something. Customers aren’t told I do this, one saw them once and they want copies of every image, usually I explain why they don’t need them but on occasion i’ve given them out.8) Now I do color correction. This means I can make albums, prints, and a high res CD from the JPGs, I generate now without having to go back to the RAW image. Color temp presets can be helpful, but I usually adjust from the preset. I often use the highlight recovery and fill light sliders to reduce the extreme bright and dark patches of the image, as it’s to much dynamic range for print (to my eye). Using too much of the highlight reduction tool turns white to grey, I find the shadow highlight tool with highlights set to 10/10 more effective, but I only do this for images going in an album.
– By experience i’ve found that I don’t want the histogram to quite touch the right hand side, else my prints come back brighter than I prefer. Exception is when the main subject isn’t the brightest part of the image. I’ve done a whole bunch of 6×4″ test prints with my lab with different brightnesses and color temps, and have discovered that what I see on my calibrated screen isn’t quite what I get back, so I recommend doing similar tests. Take 2-3 images, bracket the white balance by -2000, -1000, 1000, and 2000, and for brightness by -1.5, -1, -.5, .5, 1, 1.5, and anything else you want to try.
– I have presets defined for B&W images & sepia. To make a B&W preset for this open any RAW image, drag saturation to -100, then tweak the sliders in the calibration tab to make the image look bettter. Hit the right arrow thingy, hit save settings subset, and tick the boxes you want to tick. I have a half dozen different presets, including one that resets all settings except the main tab ones. For prints I take the color photo into photoshop and use the channel mixer. In CS4 use the B&W checkbox, and split toning, both highlights and shadows set to orange with saturation of 10-15%
– Image is straightened if it needs it (shortcut key is A)
– I do a bit of clone tool type work in the ACR tool too (shortcut key is B). I think it’s called blemish removal or something.
– A few images are taken into photoshop and played with, the result saved as a PSD in the same directoy as the RAW images. The RAW I worked from is moved to a subdirectory called “RAW Processed” (or something like that). This is so when I batch the directory I don’t get two copies of the same file.9) New The order of using the sliders is important. Exposure comes first, in conjunction with blacks – they control the left and right hand edges of the histogram, and stretch the histogram as necessary. Highlight recovery comes in there somewhere too. The brightness comes next, it shifts the center of the histogram. Only then can color temperature be accurately set – of course you need a calibrated monitor. Once this is done you can start playing with contrast, and vibrance/saturation, or do your B&W/Sepia conversions.
10) Renumber all the keepers for the customer so they’re sequential. This is important, if you don’t do it the customer wants to see the “missing” images.
11) Any required photoshop work is done at this point. Mostly I do eye swaps, head swaps, basic things like that. I save the edited files as PSD files, in the Adobe RGB color space, mostly because my album company wants Adobe RGB. Most people should use sRgb. Once the edits are done I keep the psd files in the image directory, and I move the RAW files to a “Processed” subdirectory so I keep the RAWs in case I need them in future.
12) Once all images are rated I filter for 3 star or better images, select them all, right click and choose “open in bridge”. I then hit select all, set sRgb, hit save, choose the proofs folder, set quality to ten, and hit go. This can take 10-30 minutes depending on the number of images (down from 1-2 hours with my old PC). The PSD files need to be done using image processor.
14) Use image processor to batch the images to 600pixels on the longest side for proofing. I put them into about ten folders to correspond to parts of the day (ceremony, portraits, reception, etc).
15) The generated jpg images are uploaded to my website, after creating the gallery in the shopping cart. 500 proofs are about 30MB. I use FileZilla since it can upload a number of files at the same time, which speeds things up hugely because of latency and how ftp works.
16) The images created in step 7 are used to create a DVD slide show of proofs, using Proshow Gold. Very simple show, bit of royalty free music, default transition, “f” as the caption to put the filename onto each image.
17) Backups: until I have my images stored offsite on another hard drive I keep the cards with me at all times. I mirror my hard drive onto an external hard drive, which I keep in a secure location OUTSIDE of the building I work in. If it’s in the same place a fire can destroy everything. I only delete the images from your cards once the offsite backups have been done. I’ve never lost an image, and I doubt I ever will.
18) The album is predesigned using PhotoJunction remix, the customer see this when they come to see their images (a slide show of about 100 images set to music, on my 40″ LCD TV with a nice surround sound system). This is a sales tool. The basic steps of working with PJ are:
– Export my 4* and 5* images into an “album” subdirectory
– Create the PJ project, import the images, categorise into parts of the day
– Design album
– Export as PSD files
– Sharpen and retouch
– Send to album supplierI fully endorse Paul’s suggestion of using Lightroom, Aperture for Mac users is another option. Right now Lightroom 3 is €153 direct from Adobe.
Do many couples these days, really want to sit and look at 300 to 400 images of themselves ?
Ashley, you are just not as good looking as me, I love looking at 300 odd pictures of myself :) I know we got a fair number of images, but many of them were of our guests including all our nieces and nephews. As a piece of business I would not be pissed if the photographer did not put the same level of post into the images of the guests, however the photos of the kids could lead to additional print sales and even some family work….. that said I am not in the wedding shooting line of business
brianmacl wrote:
Ashley, you are just not as good looking as me, I love looking at 300 odd pictures of myself…
Obviously that must be it Brian :wink:
By the way, my wife & I only asked for 3 pictures to be taken on our wedding day:
1. Signing the register.
2. One of us.
3. Bridal party.That was it – they were 3 very good pictures too – and I even managed not to break his camera :D
Thanks for all the good tips folks. I have since purchased Lightroom 3 (50% discount at the moment on account of Lightroom 4 release). I can definitely see the time saving advantages of it. Im still geting used to it tho but it will definitely speed up my work flow once I get to grips with it.
Ashley, from my own experience, couple expect at least 300 images from a full days shooting. Damn digital! :-)
I know it is a different area of work but I have to say I have been finding some people just want bulk but others want quality and if it is a choice more people are looking for quality now, basically if 4k relates roughly to 40 hours work they might get 400 images where you spend an average of 10 mins per image or 200 images where you spend 20 mins per picture. personally I see where Ashley is coming from and I think it is up to photographers to educate clients.
spending 30 minutes on one picture, setting it up, lighting and then touching up can create an image that will be remember for longer and have a much greater impression on a person than 10 images that were just snapped and rushed through.
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