unedited proof galleries - how many do this?

Elaine · May 16, 2009

I was given access to a proof gallery of a friend in another state who just got some photos taken of her newborn and family. I was bothered by a couple things and wondered if this was just my own issue or more standard practice than I think. The gallery had 123 unedited images in it (the client is to choose 12 for editing), but so many of them were near duplicates. And some of the near duplicates had expressions or focus issues that should have put them in the toss pile, IMO. (I believe the photog started with 500+ images.) What would be the reason for keeping so many similar shots? Is there a reason for the photog to not cull down to the best of each pose/perspective? I guess I thought that would be more standard...only show the best of the best, especially if you're sharing unedited to begin with.

I saw two shots both pre and post edit, and the difference was quite large. Meaning, sharing unedited photos that aren't technically good to begin with does not help the client "see" your vision, so chances are they may not choose to order many. This photog edits 12 after they are chosen by the client, but what if the client chooses Image #15 and it's slightly out of focus but you can't tell that by looking at the gallery and Image #16 would have been a better choice...but only the photog knows that. Grr...

Anyway, I guess sharing unedited images in a passworded proof gallery is just a choice a photog makes, but I do not understand why you wouldn't cull, cull, cull and only show the best of the best, narrowing down to no more than one from each pose.

Ann McRae · May 16, 2009

I agree, Elaine.

However, having come home from Badminton Nationals with 30K jpegs and a rush to get them on line for orders, I put everything up. they were already exported, and I will ( I hope) be able to deal with the fallout. And with time remove the crap from the galleries.

But if I were giving a client proofs from a portrait session, those proofs would all be in focus and at least edited in LR for exposure and white balance.

ann

Elaine · May 16, 2009

Ann McRae wrote:

I agree, Elaine.

However, having come home from Badminton Nationals with 30K jpegs and a rush to get them on line for orders, I put everything up. they were already exported, and I will ( I hope) be able to deal with the fallout. And with time remove the crap from the galleries.

But if I were giving a client proofs from a portrait session, those proofs would all be in focus and at least edited in LR for exposure and white balance.

ann

Hi Ann,

Yes, in your particular situation, I can see why getting them up fast would be very important. Bravo to you, by the way...30K! Whew! It seems more urgent for sports photogs to get the goods available ASAP.
This brings up an interesting point, even for portrait photogs. I wonder if some have found that an extra quick turnaround on "delivery," even if that means unedited delivery to a proof gallery, ensures more sales. Now that I think of it, though, the photog I mentioned has you choose 12 for editing and gives you those as well as the remainder of unedited shots on a CD, for $95. So, she's already decided how much she wants out of the deal and isn't too concerned about a la carte ordering. That's certainly one way of doing it. And perhaps the culling is less of a concern for her then. The edits are available after 2 1/2 weeks. I wonder if that time was used to edit even more than 12 and then post them to a gallery, if she would feel justified in charging a bit more, and maybe sell more prints, although that money would just be gravy.
I still think it's helpful to the portrait client to present a trimmed down, less confusing, very-minimal-duplicates gallery for proofing. And it puts the photog's best foot forward too, I think.

Perhaps this topic hits too closely to others already discussed here, but I'd be interested to hear what others think.

Snowgirl · May 17, 2009

I do both sports shooting (like Ann) and portrait work.

In the beginning I didn't want to spend the 'time' to edit the sports shots (high volume) unless they were ordered by a customer. For the portrait clients I would weed out the obviously unsuitable, out of focus or otherwise hideous boo boos and do some very modest, initial editing on the rest, post them (with a disclaimer) and then do final editing on those selected by the client.

Truthfully I found that neither of those two less-than-brilliant ideas worked very well. i had a few sales, but nothing to write home about.

My sport season is just starting now and, instead of posting a lot of pictures, I'm going to do some serious weeding and decent editing - posting only better examples of my work. Similarly, for portrait sessions - I am telling clients that $x = #y of photos - and they get that number of shots edited and cropped for 4 x 6 or 8 x 12. The only further editing I will do is if they are interested in larger prints, canvases etc. I'll see how this works and let you know in a few months.

Chris O · May 18, 2009

I do this a little bit. I go through all my photos in Lightroom and rate them from 1-5. Anything equal to or great than a 3, I'll send to a gallery. Sometimes it'll have photos that are very similar to each other in it, but my type of shooting, I don't take many duplicates. If it is an absurd amount of photos, I'll only do it from 4 and up.

A photographer is his own worst editor, so I let the client make the decision if they're good or not. I let them know this ahead of time, and they all understand and appreciate it. It's not a portfolio, and nobody sees it but that client.

However, I would never have photos in there that aren't up to snuff.

Elaine · May 18, 2009

Chris O wrote:

I do this a little bit. I go through all my photos in Lightroom and rate them from 1-5. Anything equal to or great than a 3, I'll send to a gallery. Sometimes it'll have photos that are very similar to each other in it, but my type of shooting, I don't take many duplicates. If it is an absurd amount of photos, I'll only do it from 4 and up.

A photographer is his own worst editor, so I let the client make the decision if they're good or not. I let them know this ahead of time, and they all understand and appreciate it. It's not a portfolio, and nobody sees it but that client.

However, I would never have photos in there that aren't up to snuff.

Thanks for your input! This is interesting to me. I've heard from people who have received a very large number of proofs from their photog (wedding or portrait) to go through and they find it very overwhelming and confusing. I guess I'm too much of a control freak to "let the client make the decision if they're good or not."

If there is more than one that's similar that makes my own technical cut, then I feel I should just offer them one to choose from. And if it's an event, I feel that presenting a story is important, without too much clutter, if that makes sense. But it's good to hear other perspectives.
I think the "up to snuff" part is subjective...depending on the expertise of the photog, of course. I don't use the ranking in LR as much as the pick and reject flags. I usually feel like the photo is either worth keeping, or it isn't.

mercphoto · May 18, 2009

Elaine wrote:

Thanks for your input! This is interesting to me. I've heard from people who have received a very large number of proofs from their photog (wedding or portrait) to go through and they find it very overwhelming and confusing. I guess I'm too much of a control freak to "let the client make the decision if they're good or not." If there is more than one that's similar that makes my own technical cut, then I feel I should just offer them one to choose from. And if it's an event, I feel that presenting a story is important, without too much clutter, if that makes sense. But it's good to hear other perspectives.
I think the "up to snuff" part is subjective...depending on the expertise of the photog, of course. I don't use the ranking in LR as much as the pick and reject flags. I usually feel like the photo is either worth keeping, or it isn't.

IMHO if you give the client too much to choose from they will get overwhelmed and run into choice paralysis. Its not a very good business strategy. And remember, if you have 2 or 3 or 4 similar photos and you only choose to show the client one of them, they will never know the difference.

Elaine · May 18, 2009

mercphoto wrote:

IMHO if you give the client too much to choose from they will get overwhelmed and run into choice paralysis. Its not a very good business strategy. And remember, if you have 2 or 3 or 4 similar photos and you only choose to show the client one of them, they will never know the difference.

Exactly my point. I agree!

Chris O · May 18, 2009

Oh, yeah I don't give them information overload or anything. That does freak out clients when they have too many to choose from.

I used to use the flags in LR, but that was a bit too black or white for me. Basically I:
-delete any that are just simply blurry or duplicates
-1 if they're terrible
-2 if they are technically okay, but still boring
-3 if they are what most people call a good picture
-4 if I think it's a good picture
-5 if I want to show everybody and use it for my portfolio

Then after that, I have my girlfriend go through them too, lol. It sounds complicated, but it actually goes faster than keep or don't keep since I don't really have to make a choice and think about it for too long.

Often times the photos I think are the best are totally different than the ones the client thinks are the best. Or I'll see comments from their friends, and their favorite is one I thought was terrible haha.

msf · May 18, 2009

I like to show the client the pictures right away, and assist in helping them choose the images. This does mean they see the unedited pictures, and the ones that should be erased before they see them. I do explain that they are unprocessed though. Showing the pictures at the same time as the shoot, does seem to help sales.

I use to process all the images before showing them, but that got very time consuming very fast and didnt last to long.

For a web gallery, its best not to have to many duplicates or any at all. But sometimes it is hard to choose between two or three pictures that are the same except for facial expressions. What I like may not be what they like.

kevinhelton · May 20, 2009

These are the kinds of issues that we all have to learn and decide on our own. And they constantly go through changing and refining. I love the idea of showing clients the photos immediately like the above post. The business part of a photography business is selling your work. Everything must be sold, from horrible work to great work and a captive audience sells better than one left to their own wandering minds (think used car salesman

). This way works better if you have a studio of office (obviously) so those of us without are a little out of luck.

However, I did read on one photographer's site a very unique approach to the proofing process. With her family sessions, she set up family shoot night. She would photograph the family in their home or at a location then send the family home to eat dinner. While they ate, she would prepare the proofs on her laptop, weeding out the unusable or duplicates and mass touching up the others with Camera Raw or Lightroom. About an hour later, she would arrive at the home and display the proofs on their TV so they can order from the comfort of their own home. What a great idea if you have the means (equipment).

But Elaine, I'm with you too. I really try not to show original stuff around. Sport shooting is different because people don't expect perfect (walk around an office and see all of the bad sport photos of kids on desks). With action sports shots of kids, parents just want decent action shots and will pay the same regardless of the time one spends editing the shots. But portrait photography comes with a higher expectation. Eyes need to be sharp, skin needs to be smooth, and exposure needs to be correct. Who's going to buy a dark, slightly blurry photo of a high school senior with acne? Plus, everything one offers in a proof gallery must be fixable, so why include anything blurry? And its not like I'm ashamed of my raw images. But I compare a raw image to an artist's sketch and the final image to a finished, framed painting.

So with all that said (mostly repeated with above posts

), here's what I do now:

Weed out the top 50 images per hour of shooting. So a 1.5 hour session will yeild about 70 proofs. This means never having more than 2 or 3 of each angle/pose combination. This also eliminates any uneditable images.
Throw them all into Camera Raw and run Auto. This is where it helps to have decent raws. I can just select the whole batch and run the auto fix and get close enough or almost close enough on almost all images. For those that still need a little work, I can select the range of similar images and adjust them at the same time.
Compress and Save. No need to have large images for proofs. Everything should be sharp and usable.
Upload to SmugMug and limit image size. I don't think clients care to see the images bigger than Large. Plus I don't want to have them see them bigger than Large because they are not really retouched. Win-win.
They pick the favs, I retouch, then upload to final gallery. Easy.
I personally fulfill the first order. Since SM doesn't offer packages or coupons, I fulfill the first order myself, giving the clients incentive to purchase more on this original order. I offer 10% the first print order and have wallet specials, etc. Then the website will be used to sell extra orders. (Until SM helps us out with packages and coupons!). This allows me to sell the work and interact with the client on a personal level.

All in all, it takes about 30 mins from pulling the images off the card to starting the upload to a proof gallery on SmugMug. There is no sense in spending time on images that will never sell but you also need to make the images appealing.

Thanks for starting the thread. I've always wonder how everyone else does it, too.

Sample proof gallery:http://www.kevinhelton.com/gallery/8189694_Ayokc
pw:allyclick

ShepsMom · May 23, 2009

Good topic. I too was wondering how and how many images presented. I had a session for a young lady, and i took about 100 pictures. I dumped about 40 of them, and did light edit for the proof gallery. I posted pictures that i thought were good, and OK. Originally, i was gonna dump those OK images, but decided to show them.
Well, to my surprise, she chosen an OK pictures, and none of the "better" ones. I was so surprised, but it shows that our perspective is whole lot different from the clients. So, give your "ok" images a go, you never know what client will buy, and you will miss on sales.

Another recent photoshoot, i took about 200 shots for a family at the beach, i posted only 89. Boy, they were somewhat surprised, because they thought i should have posted all of the images that i took.

I went ahead and 'saved" some of the images i thought were not suitable for presentation. They did like them, and purchase them. I don't know. There is no right or wrong way to do this. I'll say give them what they want, and make them happy.

filmphoto · May 24, 2009

Portrait shoots they only see what I select, maybe 50 - 70 images tops.

Weddings though are different, like a lot of us I might end up with 1,000+ images over the day. Bloopers are out straight away, but then thinning out the rest of them seems to take a long time. I seem to end up presenting 500 - 700 images.

But, I'm not happy presenting that many. If I had my way I'd present them just 100 of the images I've chosen, but I know my clients are expecting to see more.

My plan this year is to get someone else to throw away the rubbish and dupes and the just plain boring - someone who doesn't have the emotional attachment to the shoot.

WingsOfLovePhoto · May 30, 2009

I never put unedited photos up. It just doesn't look good for a professional who wants to make a reputation for themselves to do that. For portrait sessions I take alot of pictures and put up the best ones, usually 35-70 depending on the age of the child. Less for infants because they only have so many expressions or poses. For seniors more of course. And this is what I have found.... In the beginning people were certainly overwhelmed of which to choose. How I counteracted that? I made a large package that they choose whichever prints they want then get a cd of all the images for their personal use. I charge $300.00 for that package.... almost always lately, do they love the pictures so much and CAN'T choose they decide to get the package so they don't have to. That gives me a $300.00 sale for most clients. If I do 3 clients a day that is $975 gross with the sitting fee a day... Not too bad for a few hours of editing. Don't know if this helps Elaine... good thread by the way. It's good to know what others are doing!

msf · June 1, 2009

WingsOfLovePhoto wrote:

I never put unedited photos up. It just doesn't look good for a professional who wants to make a reputation for themselves to do that. For portrait sessions I take alot of pictures and put up the best ones, usually 35-70 depending on the age of the child. Less for infants because they only have so many expressions or poses. For seniors more of course. And this is what I have found.... In the beginning people were certainly overwhelmed of which to choose. How I counteracted that? I made a large package that they choose whichever prints they want then get a cd of all the images for their personal use. I charge $300.00 for that package.... almost always lately, do they love the pictures so much and CAN'T choose they decide to get the package so they don't have to. That gives me a $300.00 sale for most clients. If I do 3 clients a day that is $975 gross with the sitting fee a day... Not too bad for a few hours of editing. Don't know if this helps Elaine... good thread by the way. It's good to know what others are doing!

So you charge $300 for a cd of 35 to 70 pictures? Or do you limit the # of picturse for the $300? I do like the idea of charging a nice amount for all the pictures, its less work for more money, since you dont have to process the different print sizes, dealing with the lab, and delivery. But I dont like the idea of loosing any possible future sales, which isnt a problem if you price accordingly.

WingsOfLovePhoto · June 10, 2009

msf wrote:

So you charge $300 for a cd of 35 to 70 pictures? Or do you limit the # of picturse for the $300? I do like the idea of charging a nice amount for all the pictures, its less work for more money, since you dont have to process the different print sizes, dealing with the lab, and delivery. But I dont like the idea of loosing any possible future sales, which isnt a problem if you price accordingly.

sorry for the delay in this reply...crazy busy! so yes.... I charge $300 for a bunch of prints and a cd with all the pictures on it. Now I know some people will think that is not enough, and someday I will raise my prices but for now it is working for me as I don't make a living on photography... I am also a nurse and a real estate agent. My clientelle is also mostly babies and I know that more than $300 would be impossible for some of these young families to afford. I still deal with the lab and delivery because they get prints with their order, this also allows me to inspect what the prints from the cd will look like. I don't mind having lost future sales.... I would rather just file those pictures away and be done with them....not have to dig them out a year later.. I also allow these pictures to be uploaded to facebook etc as long as credit is given to me and a link to my website...so free advertising! :ivar

Elaine · June 10, 2009

This has all been very interesting for me to read. Thanks for sharing, folks! Sandy, I like your method. I am no where near being able to charge $300, but that sure sounds good, and it's nice and simple.

msf · June 10, 2009

This has gotten me thinking that perhaps I should offer digital images. I have a couple days of portraits for a ballet thing this weekend, so I will give it a test.

I dont want to give the pictures away for next to nothing, so the following is what I came up with.

these all will be 8x10 @ 200dpi and I will discourage them from trying to print larger, since a pro lab print would look better hanged, and the extra sale would be nice.

Package 5 - $500 - 20 digital images on cd/dvd - $30 for each additional image
Package 4 - $350 - 10 digital images on cd/dvd - $40 for each additional image
Package 3 - $250 - 5 digital images on cd/dvd - $50 for each additional image
Package 2 - $180 - 3 digital images on cd/dvd - $60 for each additional image
Package 1 - $75 - 1 digital image on cd/dvd - $85 for each additional image

I also state that they are for personal use only, not for commercial purposes.

Hopefully these prices will be tempting to my customers this weekend. Should be a package that is affordable to each customer.

zoomer · June 10, 2009

I never show anyone an unedited photo. It is not an example of my work until it is processed. I only show my best work, weddings portraits whatever it is.
I do not do proofs.
The photos the client sees are the finished fully edited product.
As part of my wedding packages I include the photos on disc, my top package has 800 fully edited pictures included on disc. We sell packages which include prints, books canvases etc.
We meet with the clients to look at all their completely finished photos with them and they normally choose the photos they want printed or in their books at that session.
I don't understand how a client can choose the photos they want from unedited proofs. In my case at least my finished product often looks VERY different from the raw photo.

Mohamed.Ghuloom · August 11, 2009

Well, I don't upload unedited versions and that's because if I edit them, I have more chance of the customer buying it, and even if didn't, the picture can remain as a good example of my work. But there is something I know: If I upload 20 Best of the Best for my client, he will buy 15! If I upload those 20 with few duplicate not that good shots, then I guarantee those 20 will be sold

shming · August 28, 2009

Chris O wrote:

I do this a little bit. I go through all my photos in Lightroom and rate them from 1-5. Anything equal to or great than a 3, I'll send to a gallery. Sometimes it'll have photos that are very similar to each other in it, but my type of shooting, I don't take many duplicates. If it is an absurd amount of photos, I'll only do it from 4 and up.

A photographer is his own worst editor, so I let the client make the decision if they're good or not. I let them know this ahead of time, and they all understand and appreciate it. It's not a portfolio, and nobody sees it but that client.

However, I would never have photos in there that aren't up to snuff.

This is the same exact process we do - but we use aperture --- here is our process - it might be a tad different
1. We reject photos before we even rate them - due to blur from either a wide open aperture or just plain old blur
2. We then rate them from 1 -5
3. filter the project so it only shows 3 to 5 rating.
4. Our ratings of 3 - 5 ensures us that those are the photos that need very little retouching so the client has an easy time choosing
5. We then add keywords -meta tag data - (headshot - full body - holding an object, etc.)
6. Upload!!!
7. We have also found that uploading too many photos causes the client to have a very difficult time choosing and puts off ordering a tad --- so what we did was for each package we offer - we specify the # of photos that will be uploaded or taken from the shoot. We try not to be shutter happy shooters (nothing wrong with that) but it tends to slow down our workflow.

Hope this helps -- if there is a more productive way - I would love to hear it and maybe give it a try.

MadisonPhotography · September 2, 2009

Yikes....
28,000 images at a badminton championship...and I thought 12k images from a swim championship was nuts..

How did you upload so many...anything special?

Thanks,
Nick

Ann McRae wrote:

I agree, Elaine.

However, having come home from Badminton Nationals with 30K jpegs and a rush to get them on line for orders, I put everything up. they were already exported, and I will ( I hope) be able to deal with the fallout. And with time remove the crap from the galleries.

But if I were giving a client proofs from a portrait session, those proofs would all be in focus and at least edited in LR for exposure and white balance.

ann

unedited proof galleries - how many do this?

Comments