Wedding Photography Digital Workflow

One key aspect of wedding photography which can easily be overlooked is digital workflow. How you store, edit, process and present your images after a wedding is very important as it will dictate how long you spend in front of your computer, and more importantly, how safe your images are.

In this article Dave Nunn of Dave Nunn Studios, a superb Staffordshire based wedding photographer whom I have long admired, very kindly details his digital workflow.

Once you have read Dave’s article I would highly recommend you visit Dave’s website at www.davenunnstudios.co.uk!

Wedding Photography Digital Workflow

One of the many questions I am asked by aspiring wedding photographers is ‘What is your workflow?’, and ‘Why is it taking me a week to process a wedding?’, I will try to outline how we process a wedding for you…

Firstly, hardware. We use all Apple Mac, a 24″ iMac with 4Gb ram and a Mac Pro quad core with 10Gb ram running 2 x 23″ Apple HD cinema monitors. We find that Macs run very smooth and fast without crashes, obviously this kind of processing power helps to speed up processing and lessen the time we spend in front of computers.

As soon as we return from a wedding, all our compact flash cards are downloaded to my Mac. Those cards are then stored separately from all the others. All the original files are then burnt to an external hard drive.

Next step, the files are dragged into iView media Pro for editing. Firstly highlighting all files, then sorting by date / time. This puts all the photographs in order of the time taken (don’t forget to time sync your cameras before the days shoot), they are then renamed.

Now for the edit. In iView, from thumbnail view I go into single image view. For this bit I use a wide Intous3 Wacom pad, this has 4 buttons each side which are programmed to flick through and delete images. Using fingers only and not having to move my arms or a mouse, I can flick left and right through the files, deleting unwanted images as I go. I always edit ‘IN’ my images, in other words as you are going through the images, just keep the ones you definitely want and delete the rest. Next, a folder is created for the Bride & Groom with three sub folders, raws, jpegs and previews.

Once I have my final edit, all the remaining images are dragged into the raws sub folder. The Bride & Grooms folder is then burnt again to an external hard drive. If I am happy with my edit, the original burnt file on the hard drive is replaced with the new Bride & Groom folder. The raw folder is now imported into Adobe Lightroom. When importing into Lightroom I apply a preset I have made, adding brightness, blacks, and a number of hue and saturation colour adjustments to correct the Canon skin tones. Now once imported the only thing I use Lightroom for is to correct white balance, cropping and any exposure adjustments required. I do not use presets in Lightroom or create duplicates for B&W’s etc, I do all this in Adobe Photoshop. I do not use camera profiles in Lightroom, always sticking to the Adobe Standard profile. Keep everything as simple as possible.

The corrected raws are now batch processed from Lightroom as jpeg files straight into the Bride & Grooms jpeg sub folder. The jpegs are then all previewed in Photoshop CS4. I then batch process the images I would like in B&W. Now if you think your Bride & Groom might want to see the colour version, just create another sub folder called colour and drag in a copy of the images you are processing into B&W. You then have a colour option readily available if required. Special effects are then applied to selected images, and saved as a B version so you still have the original file. Everything done in Photoshop is with either the Wacom mouse or Wacom tablet, both mouse and tablet have their keys programmed to run actions, create vignettes, flatten, sharpen etc. This saves so much time during processing. I have created actions in Photoshop CS4 to run most things I use at the press of a button.

Once everything is processed and you are happy with your final files, rename again if required, then using the image processor from Bridge, batch all the full sized jpegs into preview size with watermark for client viewing on the web. All our client proofing is done online.

When I have reached this stage, the job is almost done. I burn the Bride & Groom folder to the external hard drive, again overwriting the old one. Burn a copy to DVD, then run Time Machine for mac (which is basically burning the files to a second external hard drive).

Job done. This process, if I am lucky enough to not get any interruptions, can be completed in a single day. I hope this helps you towards streamlining your wedding workflow and gives you more time to get out with your camera.

Cheers

Dave