Wedding photography workflow.

The digital age was hailed as the freedom that photographers had wanted for years, but in reality it’s chained many of them to their PCs late into the night after a shoot. For some, it’s a necessary evil, get the basics done, archive and move on. For others it’s the start of an artistic journey. My company, Times Two Studios, specialises in helping photographers with their workflow – we take their digital files, color correct, tweak and artistically work them in their own style. Long before my partner Craig and I began to offer these services I’ve had a workflow for my own shooting that suites my style and makes me more productive.

Many photographers these days shoot JPEG – the awesome Adobe Lightroom now offers the same tools to correct JPEGs as it does for RAW, and for some workflows it’s the fastest and easiest way to work. I shoot RAW for many reasons, none of which are ‘to save my ass’. While RAW does contain many more times the amount of data than a JPEG file and duff exposures can be brought back in, that’s not an excuse for poor shooting. The number 1 reason a wedding photographer should be shooting RAW is white balance. During a fast moving event like a wedding with changable lighting conditions, it’s impossible to set a custom white balance that will stick for more than a few shots. You may have window light mixed with tungsten mixed with flash – your custom balance will get it wrong on several. So, shoot auto then right? Nope. Again, each image will have a different white value. When you shoot JPEG, that white value is written into the file. For ever. And ever. It becomes virtually impossible to get a set of images to match. If you shoot auto white balance and RAW however, that white value isn’t embedded into the file and you have a much better chance of getting a series of images to match.

So – for my workflow, I need to have the tools available to edit, process and file RAW images.

My workflow begins before the shoot, by syncing the clocks on any cameras that may get used – this ensures that the shoot will be in order when imported into software later on.

When I get home from a shoot the first order of business is to download the cards to my hard drive. I use a firewire reader over a USB one for speed. All the images go into one folder. I am very fastidious about backing up everything, so before I do any edits at all, I open Adobe Bridge, rename the whole shoot with the date and a reference name – for example: 030708-Mike_001.CR2 – and then back them up to an external hard drive. They are then burnt to 2 sets of DVDs. This step is still part of my process, but in the next year I’m going to phasing that out, and instead moving to having multiple hard drives for back up. DVDs are just not reliable long term, slow to archive and retrieve, and actually more expensive that HDs. Hard drives aren’t 100% reliable, but they are much faster to back up to…time is money!

Once the back ups are done, I sort through my first edit. In the past, I’ve used pretty much every piece of software, but have recently moved over to Photo Mechanic – and it rocks. Nothing on the market can display RAW files as quick. You can bash through a shoot and make your selects in a few hours.

These are then moved to a selects folder and renamed again, in sequence.

Next step is to import the selects into Adobe Lightroom. I’ve tested Aperture from Apple, but it lacks some key features and a bit of speed from Lightroom. When importing I create full size previews – which helps speed later on.

My first step in Lightroom is to quickly run through the shoot and pick out my favorites – these ones will get special treatment in Photoshop later.

The shoot is then processed using my own presets and style – this different for everyone, and the photographers that use our services at Times Two Studios all have their own presets that we created for them. The images are balanced for exposure, contrast and white balance. Any images that I set aside for custom work are then looked at to see if there are any presets in Lightroom that might work, and then the whole lot are exported as full resolution JPEGs with sRGB profile embedded. For the majority of the images, that’s it. For the special ones, they are then taken into Photoshop for any artisic edits.

Once all images have been finished, I then make any online galleries or slideshows needed for the shoot, and then back up the finals to DVDs and external hard drives.

The above workflow is the basis of not only my personal one, but the workflow that we use at Times Two Studios. It will evolve as software changes and as our needs do, but we’ve found it’s the fastest and easiest way to manage large shoots.