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07/08/2007 01:23:23 PM · #1
Last weekend I ended up shooting a wedding for some friends. Any suggestions on workflow for the 955 shots I took and now need to slog my way through? I've already made my first pass and removed the 166 that were just bad all round but I've got the remaining 788 to work with. I'm currently cursing my agreeableness.
07/08/2007 01:27:10 PM · #2
Im sure the "wedding vetrans" can help you... I just did the same thing last weekend.... I feel your pain :)

I did each photo individually.... but you must be able to use batch processing.... I just never have needed to learn how to use it....

Good Luck.... looking forward to seeing them!
07/08/2007 01:50:25 PM · #3
One word... actions. If you are going to be shooting a lot of weddings I highly recommend you buy the Kabota action packs. Either way it only takes a few minutes to make actions out of some of your most common adjustments. By using batch processing out of bridge or lightroom and some select actions to help add some pop and other simple fixes it can really help cut down the production time. You will still have to touch many of the images individually but it sure cuts down on how many.

When I started doing weddings it could take me anywhere from 3-6 days of 4-6 hrs to touch each image. With a good set of actions and experience it really only takes me 6-15 hrs total now and the results are in many ways much better.

Just remember not to over-work every image. The client won't even put a hard look at many of them. Spend the most time on the key images or best captures.

Good luck. Be sure to post a few once you have them done.
07/08/2007 02:02:11 PM · #4
why dont you sit down with them and let them pick out shots before editing?
07/08/2007 02:11:16 PM · #5
If you shot in RAW, I suggest Lightroom. The trial should give ya ample time to do your conversions. Well worth the price tag.
07/08/2007 02:11:17 PM · #6
this is spooky.. I'm dealing with the exact same scenario.. I just shot a wedding yesterday with another photographer.. I was basically her assistant, and between the two of us, we shot 788 images.. lol

she normally shoots with a film camera if you can believe that.. She's finally giving in to what she calls the darkside & switching to digital, though she had to borrow the camera for yesterdays shot.. I figured I go through & get rid of the obvious ones and then finally learn how to use the batching process.. Then I'm going to go through around 20 and really make some different images out of them.. The couple we shot are on a super small budget and only wanted the 4 x 6's so I'm not going to spend an obscene amount of time on the 20 I'm going to put together.. Maybe just a few storyboards and some with a little special effects added.. Other then that, it's sharpen and resize.

I'll be interested to hear what more of the wedding photog's do in cases like this. I think it's our job as the photog to pick out which images we want them to have.. I think they'll have a harder time going through all of the images & picking which ones to keep.. Just my thoughts on that suggestion.
07/08/2007 02:12:27 PM · #7
Originally posted by HawesPhotoKC:


Just remember not to over-work every image. The client won't even put a hard look at many of them. Spend the most time on the key images or best captures.


Good advice and tell the customers you will work up the images they want enlargements for.
07/08/2007 02:28:58 PM · #8
Hardest part of shooting the wedding is the post-processing/sorting of the images. I did one with an assistant 2 weeks ago and between us we had over 1500 images, granted the assistant was very trigger happy and had lots of duplicate shots, but even after thinning them down I still had over 800 to go through.

Lightroom really is a good choice when it comes to this part of the game however be aware that you shouldn't really use all 5 stars of the rating process, that is rate a photo as either 1 star = rubbish, 5 stars = keeper. Initially when I started out I ended up going through them rating them 1,2,3,4 or 5... bad idea as you end up going thru the 2s,3s & 4s again trying to re-rate them, basically if you do that you are doubling your workload.

(OK, a little tip here you might want to try, when I was an avid gamer I had a little program called "Game Commander", basically it was a way of assigned keystrokes to voice commands. I have it programmed at the moment on mine to recognise the words "KEEP" and "REJECT", these are mapped to the keystrokes for "Rate 1 and move onto next image" and "Rate 5 and move onto next image", this way I can stick my headset on, and just sit here `keeping` or `rejecting` by voice, makes life a little easier)

The colour processing/cropping etc I keep to a minimum, basically you really need to be able to nail a shot at the time of shooting. Granted some will need a bit tweaking or can be given the WOW factor with a little work, but you really need to bang through the first part as quickly as possible. If you dont shoot that many weddings then you can afford to spend a bit more time here, but from my point of view I really have to have them all done within 4 days as usually I have a another wedding the following weekend and the whole process starts again. Obviously you will have 20 or 30 shots that are absolutely killer that scream out for photoshop trickery to be performed to make them drop dead gorgeous. I always make sure I do a handful of these so I can show the couple "what is possible" with the photos they finally choose for the album.

One thing you must never ever do is let them come round and go through the shots on your computer.. I did that with my 3rd wedding and the couple (who were really quite horrid) were round mine for like 4 hours one evening. Not a good experience. (AlexSaberi will back me up on this one, he was stuck with the groom on the day of the wedding and the guy and his friends were complete morons).

The whole post-selection thing comes with time, but you have to remember to be ruthless with the crap.. get rid of it, this is a representation of your work so you only want them to see the good stuff. At the end of the day even if ytou can present them with 500 images, thats a hell of a lot.

Good luck!!

07/08/2007 02:44:31 PM · #9
I sort through them in Bridge and mark the ones I think are keepers from the first pass. Then I sort by the ones I picked and start going through them. I then go through each image one by one making final adjustments and approval. Nice thing about CS2 is you can copy/paste RAW adjustments (love it). I also use actions a lot, especially for minor adjustments (i.e., final USM, resizing, etc).

Personally, I normally shoot 300 - 400 images total (ceremony and reception), with two shooters. Rarely do I give the customer more than 200 - 250 images. I don't see the point in giving them a bunch of junk. I mean, how many pictures of uncle Jeb eating wedding cake at the reception does the couple really need (or want)? Pick out your best work and only give those to your customer. Quality trumps quantity any day.

Message edited by author 2007-07-08 14:45:18.
07/08/2007 02:53:41 PM · #10
Thanks all for the quick and full answers. I'm currently running with CS3 and Bridge to rate my shots and pull up the occasional one to see if I can show it a little more love. I'm trying to be ruthless in my self critiquing and pare the pile down to something that's manageable. My first pass was a 1=dear gods, wtf happened there??? or a 2=keep. Next pass will be a 1=needs an edit, 3=not bad and 5=photographic genius. I'm hoping to have things pared down with a minimum of 1's or just needing very light tweaks. I suspect there'll be a whole pile of 3's and maybe a couple 5's.

As the couple are friends, they're basically getting everything I shot (that was in focus) on DVD as my wedding gift along with an album of the top 100 or so (to be mutually decided on). Thus, I'm not too concerned about having them sit around my computer for a few hours and yakking away about the pictures. Bride-zilla she is/was not. They were more than happy just to have someone wrangle everybody when it came time for pictures and not have to think about it themselves.

Hopefully by the end of the week of I'll something worthwhile to post and I'll collect some comments from you fine folk.
07/08/2007 03:04:44 PM · #11
im in the same boat i shot me first wedding as a back up to the pro,last week and between us we had over 1000 images

she has 5 more weddings this summer that i should be helping her with guess that means im going to have to get a new camera oh the choices

Message edited by author 2007-07-08 15:08:19.
07/08/2007 03:38:26 PM · #12
another thing you can do it use the colour coding in lightroom or bridge and assign a colour to certain editing youll need to do, say blue can mean colour/exposure adjustment, red can mean remove glasses glare, green can cloning, yellow skin touch ups etc. etc.

and it will help to move along quicker with all your batch editing

Message edited by author 2007-07-08 15:39:00.
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