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Do you enjoy spending most of your day slaving away in front of your computer?
Editing thousands of photos?
If you're like me, probably not.
So stick around, in the next series of videos I'm gonna show you my wedding workflow that's
gonna save you a lot of time and help reduce how long it takes you to edit a wedding.
So, check it out!
Ok, Hi everybody. I'm gonna show you my wedding workflow. This first part is going to be the
import procedure.
I shot a wedding on Saturday so I'm gonna show you what I do to get the photos into
my library and how I organize them and give you some time saving tips.
So I use Lightroom 4 and I've got my card into my Firewire card reader. It's very very
quick, it's firewire 800 and I like it quite a bit.
What I do is, first off don't import suspected duplicates so we don't wanna double up on
anything.
Over here to render previews I've got that set to 1:1 so that, as it's importing the
photos it's rendering the previews 1:1. This just really speeds things up overall as I'm
working with the images. If I wan't to zoom in, check detail, that sort of thing as I'm
working with them. It just makes things a lot faster, just more efficient.
I'm gonna import all of the photos, even if I have ones that I know I blew it, it's overexposed,
what have you. I'm gonna import them all anyway.
Because I don't want to make a judgment call on an image that's really too small to tell
much about in the initial preview.
Um, some people rename the files, I don't. I leave them as it is until the very end.
I don't have any develop settings put on I shoot in RAW.
I do have presets for my meta data so that it has all of my contact information, my copyright
information. All of those things are automatically embedded into the metadata of every photograph
that I import.
I'm gonna go ahead an put in too, keywords. So wedding, the place where the wedding was.
In this particular case this was a New Orleans wedding. Louisiana, apparently I miss spelled
Louisiana at some point.
I'm gonna put in the client name. And just kinda basic things like that. I'm not gonna
get into categories or things like that at this point.
So then what I'm gonna do is, I have a pictures folder that everything goes to on the hard
drive. I'm gonna have it organized by date. I'm gonna put into a sub folder that I've
already created with the clients name.
And then from there I just click import, and away we go!
So once we've got them all imported I'm gonna show you how we go from there.
Ok, so now that I've got all of my photos imported and the previews have been generated,
the first thing that I do is back everything up.
I use Time Machine which exports to a rugged, portable, external hard drive. Whenever I
leave the studio it goes with me.
My camera also takes two memory cards so it backs up simultaneously. I have one card that
is set to record raw and the second one set to record jpegs, so that I always have at
least something. And I prefer to shoot in raw. All of the images that you see that are
in the library are in RAW.
So what I'm gonna do is go through each image individually, and ones that I want to keep
I'm gonna flag as a pick.
You know some of them I'm going to have to alternate through to decide which ones I really
like.
I started out, there's about 1,500, 1,533 in this wedding and that includes a few videos
that my wife actually took of me photographing the wedding. I wanted to use those for some
teaching moments.
I may zoom in to check sharpness. This is where it helps to have had those previews
rendered 1 to 1 when you were doing the import.
So, I pretty much, I think I like the first one the best. It's the one I'm gonna go with.
There's one of those videos of me.
And, what I'm gonna do is go through and select all of the images that I want to keep.
If I don't want to keep it I don't select it and at the end, I'm gonna delete them.
I'm going to completely delete any images that I'm not going to keep.
And the reason why I'm going to delete them is because they would otherwise take up a
bunch of hard drive space.
The reality is that I'm not going to go back and get them later on.
It just takes up space unnecessarily.
So why hang on to them, why archive them if you're never going to use them.
You know this especially goes for images that are blown out, you know that, that just aren't
going to make it.
So, I have also, I use two cameras throughout the day, and I sync the cameras to the computer
before I even go to the wedding.
That makes things pretty easy for me so that the time is set exactly, and I don't have
to try and reconcile that after the fact. Makes things a lot easier for me when I'm
doing this. When I'm editing.
Now I'll skip ahead to a couple of them and show you one of the things that you'll see.
I set a custom white balance through out the day as I'm shooting. And, so I'll take a picture
of a target as the basis for setting the custom white balance.
Now, there are gonna be times where, it's just not a lot of time to do that, to set
the custom white balance in the camera.
So what I may do is take a picture of the target it's self and I can use it as a white
balance reference later on.
So, like here's a better example of what the target looks like.
I go over, whoops! Where did it go.
There it is.
I go over to the develop module.
Grab my white balance eye dropper, select it, and then what I can do is sync my white
balance using that for the subsequent photos.
And I'm gonna undo that synchronize setting because I think I actually did set the white
balance in the camera. But that's one of the things to help with
your workflow to make sure that it goes quickly and smoothly is to have your white balance
correct in the camera.
The less you have to do modifying after the fact, the faster you're gonna be in your image
processing.
So, I'm gonna go through and select the images I want to keep, I'm gonna delete the ones
I don't want to keep.
And, I'll show you what we're gonna do after that, so, c-ya!