Blog
OK I've got 500 shots of someone's wedding day; so what's next?
29/12/09
Post.
I run a Macbook Pro through a 23” Apple cinema display. I keep both of these calibrated with an Eye One Display 2 unit. Just for added accuracy I use a daylight balanced tube in my office – these are easy enough to get hold of these days and cost little more than a conventional tube. Software wise I use Lightroom as my weapon of choice, which has Photoshop and the Nik Pro suite of effects set up as plug-ins. I was a real PS only guy until about six months ago when I finally got into Lightroom (after having a copy on my machine for over a year) after reading Sean McCormack’s ‘Photoshop Lightroom Made Easy’, which is a brilliant book to get you into this software quickly.
In terms of workflow through Lightroom I tend to do three sweeps. First a quick edit sweep where all non-keepers including those with unrecoverable exposure and focus issues (I’m not perfect) are rejected along with close duplicates and the blatantly uninteresting. Next I look a little more closely, particularly at group formals, for things like closed eyes, hidden heads and kids giving me the finger etc, again rejecting those that I don’t feel are worth trying to save. Finally I’ll go through each shot doing the developing and rendering. Some shots lean towards being obviously in mono or colour, while others are less clear-cut, so I have no problem with rendering two versions and giving the customer the choice. Similarly many shots clearly live best with a particular effects treatment, but for those that don’t multiple rendering is the order of the day. I won’t go into what kind of effects I use in my wedding photographs regularly – suffice it to say they’re fairly popular in the industry.
All of my customers now get a DVD ROM with high-resolution finished images. Following this many are happy to take care of printing and album procurement for themselves, some order prints and/or albums from me. I understand the temptation of many of my competitors to insist on releasing only low-res images; after all I used to do this myself. However I soon began to find that in a world where high quality digital printing and on-line press-bound books are as readily available to the general public as baked beans, that customers were becoming increasingly resentful of being tied to me for finished image products. So much so in fact that I’m confident that in the past I’ve lost potential clients as a result of this practice. Its curious to note however that when shown a typical on-line album from say Photobox, Blurb or Apple, next to one of Graphistudio’s or Loxley Colour’s products, just how many will be willing to spend the extra few hundred quid. Likewise when they see high quality, well mounted and framed prints.
File Management:
Now that I’ve got used to using it I find the library functions of Lightroom quite straightforward to use and very logical. My only gripe at the moment is that the beta release of the LR3 update doesn’t appear to accept older Lightroom libraries, which will eventually mean importing older archives from scratch or keeping two versions of the software live on my laptop.
I make a point of copying the content of my CF cards to Lightroom ASAP following a shoot and then backing them up onto en external drive, which is itself RAIDed before I begin processing. I tend to do only one wedding per weekend, which gives me plenty of time to process one set of images before capturing another. As an extra precaution I try to always ensure that I’ve burned the finished DVD ROM and posted it to the client before I format any cards that I used on that assignment.
For ease of access I tend to keep files from my last 10 or so weddings on my laptop. This way if a client requests that I rework any images I can get to the relative files very quickly. It also means that if I want to reprocess any files for use on my website or for other purposes access is also easy. Even after the files are deleted from my laptop there are still two copies of everything on the RAIDed external backup drive. Unwanted material is deleted from this after a year.
Albums and prints etc:
When it comes to preparing album layouts I tend to use Adobe InDesign over Photoshop as it’s quicker and more versatile for this kind of work. If a more basic layout is required I’m not too proud to use the templates provided online via ROES or the like. At the end of the day my own layouts, though far more individual than the off the shelf template ones, cost more, and the extra hundred quid or so I charge for this service can be a sticking point, particularly for those on a tighter budget. I guess customers never actually see as many off the shelf templates as I do so they don’t appreciate the individuality of my work.
I print on an Epson R2880 with a Permajet CIS attached, with Epson inks costing about the same quantity for quantity as uncut heroine the CIS is an absolute must for volume printing and the quality is just as good to my eyes. I also use Permajet papers, mostly Oyster (semi-gloss/lustre) and sometimes their fibre based Royal. I source frames from a number of outlets and Rowney mounting board similarly. I’ve been using a mount cutter long enough to be fairly good at it these days and being able to cut mounts to suit unusual crops rather than using over sized mounts or getting mounts cut by a third party is well worth the investment of time to practice.