first wedding...

dreamcometrue

Hi everyone! I am working on my first set of wedding photos, and I was wondering what type of process you pros out there use to get through the thousand+ pics. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Photog4Christ

dreamcometrue wrote:

Hi everyone! I am working on my first set of wedding photos, and I was wondering what type of process you pros out there use to get through the thousand+ pics. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Import them all into Lightroom

Go through them ALL and do a "first glance" test... Are the OOF, someone blinked, someone's picking their nose? etc.... toss them out

Go through all of the remaining and see if there are are any of the above (OOF....) you missed.

Go through remaining and see if there are duplicate images, such as same pose, etc... you don't need 20 shots of "The Kiss"

Then I tweak the remaining, do some PP, convert to B & W, etc....

Tada!!!! You have your images to show to the couple!

Scott_Quier

First - remember that you are there to tell the story of the day. Not to document every little thing. Second, the culling process is your friend. I currently use Bridge (I just can't seem to get my head around Lightroom though I keep trying 'cause I can see the advantages ):

1. Create a folder for the event
2. Under that folder, two folders: "keepers", "culls"
3. Under "keepers" -> "01-Preparations", "02-Ceremony", "03-Portraits", "04-Reception", "05-Specials".
4. Load all the photos into a single folder, renaming as you move them. I use the format HHMMSS_Smith. Rational: This way they are going to be sorted in chronological order and when I toss them, the client has not "serial number" to use to know just how much they are not getting - gaps are not obvious.
5. Go through them once - they are either a keeper or they are not. None of this "rate on a scale of 5 thing". I'm not too critical at this point as I'll being re-screening them as I process them.
6. The "non-keepers" go into a "cull" folder. I don't throw them away yet. Anything that is OOF and can't be saved as an "artsy" shot, exposure so far off that it's not recoverable (don't many of these any more), unflattering, wardrobe failures, etc all get a short trip to the culls. I might save the really, really good wardrobe failures for special treatment and presentation to the client if I think they might like them - that varies. For duplicates, I choose the best one as a keeper, the rest go into the culls.
7. The keepers go into folders 01 through 05 (see above) based on the portion of the day to which they pertain.
8. Apply appropriate gross adjustments (WB, exposure, black point, brightness, contrast, etc) correction to groups of shots at a time. Know that I only shoot RAW, so adjustments are really nothing more than writing metadata to a sidecar xmp file.
9. Many of them can be pumped right out of Bridge. The balance get a quick trip through PS
10. Candidates for a trip through PS include those that
    • Are to be converted to B&W, duotone, monotone
    • Need both a crop and a non-standard vignette
    • Need edits (clone, masks, etc)
    As I'm editing them in PS, if they just aren't meeting my expectations, I drop the edit and (using Bridge) move the RAW file for that image to the cull folder.
11. There have been instances where, as I'm going through the set that I realize that there's a big gap in the story and I go back into the culls to see if there isn't a shot there than can be recovered and used to fill that gap. This is way I don't delete the culls. In fact, I don't delete the culls until I've gotten sign-off from the client on the delivery.

Of course, not included in the above descriptions is the back-ups that I make (it's only professional to make appropriate backups to allow for recovery from catastrophy) and the off-site storage that should be done, etc.

HTH

Kinkajou

Scott - this is awesome. Thank you so much for posting this; I'll definitely put the folder structure idea to good use.

dreamcometrue

Thank you so much Scott. D

zoomer

Load photos into Lightroom.
Go through them and delete all the ones you don't like.
Do Auto Sync adjustments to all the photos at once for saturation boost,
contrast, black level, Sharpening at the end of everything else.

Then go through and do auto sync to small groups in the same lighting for exposure adjustments where necessary.

Then do any special effects or presets, crops, that you want to use.

Export, changing to Jpeg as they export.

Usually takes me about 4 hours to do 600 or so photos, from start to finish.

I don't do any sorting, folders, don't worry about keeping them in order.
I either keep them or I don't and they just all stay together in one folder.

Look seriously at getting Lightroom and loading a bunch of presets, it makes it SO SO much easier.

elizabeth_Luna

zoomer wrote:

Load photos into Lightroom.
Go through them and delete all the ones you don't like.
Do Auto Sync adjustments to all the photos at once for saturation boost,
contrast, black level, Sharpening at the end of everything else.

Then go through and do auto sync to small groups in the same lighting for exposure adjustments where necessary.

Then do any special effects or presets, crops, that you want to use.

Export, changing to Jpeg as they export.

Usually takes me about 4 hours to do 600 or so photos, from start to finish.

I don't do any sorting, folders, don't worry about keeping them in order.
I either keep them or I don't and they just all stay together in one folder.

Look seriously at getting Lightroom and loading a bunch of presets, it makes it SO SO much easier.

Agree with Zoomer that is what I do. thumb

mpaulie

zoomer wrote:

Look seriously at getting Lightroom and loading a bunch of presets, it makes it SO SO much easier.

Can you recommend any standard presets that you use?
Thanks!

zoomer

Look up Lightroom presets on the web and start downloading the freeones.
Try them out and see which ones you like.
there are a lot of free ones.

Shima

zoomer wrote:

Look up Lightroom presets on the web and start downloading the freeones.
Try them out and see which ones you like.
there are a lot of free ones.

My favorite presets for weddings are the PH ones.
http://www.presetsheaven.com/2009/02/19/8-epic-lightroom-presets-for-weddings/

There are a handful of other ones I use, but these are my favorites. Google searching for presets is your friend

elizabeth_Luna

Shima wrote:

My favorite presets for weddings are the PH ones.
http://www.presetsheaven.com/2009/02/19/8-epic-lightroom-presets-for-weddings/

There are a handful of other ones I use, but these are my favorites. Google searching for presets is your friend

Thanks for posting this!