Wedding Photography Workflow - Lightroom and Photoshop

Here’s how I manage my wedding workflow, from shoot to final product.

1. Shoot

I currently use a Canon 5D MkII and a Canon 40D to shoot the wedding. The 40D is my backup, but I have it over my shoulder most of the time with the EF-S 10-22mm lens attached to get my ultra-wide angle shots. The 40D is loaded with a 4Gb CF card which is more than enough for the whole shoot; the 5D MkII is fed with 8Gb CF cards throughout the shoot. I tend to grab in the region of 1600-1700 over the whole day, most of which are on 8Gb cards in the 5D MkII. I shoot entirely in RAW.

2. Ingest

I use a SanDisk Extreme Firewire Reader to pull data into my iMac off the cards. My relationship with this gadget has been rocky: I’ve already had to send two back to the manufacturers, the first would only show up on my system intermittently, the replacement they sent eventually suffered from a broken connector pin inside. SanDisk customer services (in Europe) is pretty good, although they took ages to replace the second device. I’ve got another replacement now and it seems to be working okay.

When it works, it’s fast.

Everything goes into a specific wedding catalogue in Lightroom 3. I don’t keyword anything or apply any custom presets upon import other than my own default one which reduces sharpening and turns off all noise reduction, but I do attach copyright and basic metadata. I rename my files to ‘bridegroomdatelocation0001’. The RAWs get their own folder on a seperate, non-boot partition of my iMac hard drive.

3. Cull & Select

Out of the 1600-1700 shots now in the catalogue, many can be deleted straight away. I go through the whole collection in the Library module, Loupe view and hit the X key for duff shots - the badly exposed, the out of focus and the plain rubbish. At this stage, I’m also
making my initial selection - those images which have a chance of making it to the final edit, i.e. they contribute to the story of the day and they are techincally good enough to make the grade. I hit B on this to add to the Quick Collection.

4. RAW processing

I typically end up with 500-600 images in the Quick Collection and each is firstly scrutunised for imperfections such as dust on the sensor, closed eyes, trees and branches sticking out of people’s head, etc. If an image needs a lot of cleaning up in Photoshop, I consider dropping it from the collection if another image fits the bill in the story. I want to do as much editing in Lightroom as possible without doing much heavy lifting in Photoshop.

Each image undergoes basic adjustments in the basic Develop module panel - exposure, fill light, recovery and blacks are my sliders here. Often I will apply the Auto Tone to see if equalises the exposure correctly and often it does. My primary aim is to reduce contrast and even out the histogram, making sure nothing is clipped at either end of the spectrum.

I then use a number of sliders to “style” the image, which for me varies from shoot to shoot. Sometimes a muted palette of colours suits the wedding, other times I go for a warmer, more colourful, saturated look. Depends on the weather, the venue, the people and the clothes.

Here I’m using vibrance, split tonining and the whole arsenal of colour sliders - as well as the camera profile settings - to achieve the look I want. The reliable ones get added as a preset to use in future. I have about six self-created presets I use regularly.

If I’m happy after making the edits, I apply a colour label to the image which marks it as final. If I want to take an image into Photoshop for further work, it gets a different colour label.

This process takes the best part of a full day’s work, sometimes two. Files selected for editing in Photoshop are exported to a separate folder as 16-bit PSD files - which from the 5D MkII are in the range of 100Mb in size. Duplicate a few layers on these babies and pretty quickly you’re working on a file approaching 1Gb in size, which takes an athletic system to deal with, so plenty is RAM needed (I’ve got 4Gb of RAM and actually I need more).

5. Photoshop

Photoshop is an absolute brutal powerhouse of an application but of course you can be as subtle or as devastating as you want. Often, I’ll use it purely to clone out imperfections and nothing more. Selecting in Photoshop has got better with every version, and now with CS5 it is even better. I’d say it still can’t select hair yet without going into monstrous detail with channel masking, but it’s pretty damn good. Time spent cleaning up an image to remove hairs, flare, reflections, stray limbs, dust, etc - is time well spent. It is one of the key things that separates the amateur from the pro in my opinion and it is vital for shooting weddings, when you can rarely control the background as you’d want.

Many of my signature images, such as the bride and groom portraits, get special treatment in Photoshop. I use a number of self-created actions to do this or make simple adjustments individually to improve an image. Here, depending on the lighting conditions at the time of the shoot and whether or not I was able to use flash or not, I’m concentrating on adding fill light to the subject and burning or vignetting the edges or the background - I want the subject to be at the forefront of the image. I might also increase the contrast in the key areas such as the eyes and the hair by applying masked S-Curves in Luminosity mode.

I save the important images (basically anything the client may want printed) with layers intact as PSD files and import these back into the Lightroom catalogue. These become my master files.

6. Sharpening

Never underestimate how important sharpening is in any digitial photography workflow. RAW files come off camera inherently soft. You tend to get used to them when you’re editing and see them as sharp, but when you sharpen properly, the difference is amazing and is often the key ingredient to people being impressed with your images, or at least commenting on the quality of your glass. Sharp glass is essential but if you don’t properly sharpen in post-production, and by that I mean sharpen correctly for the intended media, you might as well use a cheap kit lens.

Once I’ve done all my Photoshop edits, I select all RAW and PSD files in Lightroom, add some useful metadata, such as details of the shoot, and export them out to a seperate folder as JPGs at 72ppi, quality 10. Each of these is run through Nik Software Output Sharpener Pro which I’ve found to be the best sharpening algorithm around. I apply sharpening selectively so only the main subject gets it. The background should be soft.

At this stage, I am only sharpening for viewing onscreen, which means less sharpening than if I intended to print the image. These images are for viewing on my web site - if used for printing they’d be too small (72ppi) and and too soft.

7. Export for web gallery

All sharpened JPGs are then uploading to my web site. This whole process can take days as I’m talking about uploading a few hundred Mb of data here and upload speeds at UK ISPs are appalling.

My iMac works all night luckily whilst I don’t.

That’s it - in a very quick nutshell. Shoot to JPG. See you soon. Bye.

Comments

[Anna]

Thanks for the rundown. I'm new to wedding photography and looking for tips on how to manage a large amount of images without sacrificing quality and days of work! I've been noticing that LR is not good for sharpening and have realized I need to find another way. My question is, how do you go about providing your clients with prints? You talk about output for web but how do you deal with prints? I have been uploading print quality images to smugmug for example which is incredibly time consuming. Also, it is a huge drag to have to export and sharpen hundreds of images for print. Is there an easy way to let clients choose from lo res images they see online and get them printed?

Thanks!

[Matthew]

Hi - thanks for your comment. Nice images in your gallery by the way...

LR isn't great for sharpening true, but it's not really designed for the kind of sharpening I like to do, which is selective and targeted to only one particularly area - often the eyes. However, LR is wonderful for pretty much everything else at the RAW processing stage of the whole workflow.

On sharpening, I usually end up with a batch of 200-300 images exported from LR as TIF or PSD files. Having done all the heavy lifting in Lightroom (RAW processing, exposure, white balance, etc), I then use Photoshop to fine tune the images and put in the finishing touches. A big part of this is selective sharpening. This is best done by recording an Action in Photoshop and assigning a keyboard shortcut to it, so the repetition across 200-300 files doesn't kill you. There's another piece of software I've used called Nik Sharpener Pro which does batch sharpening, but I've found it too complicated and tricky to use. In the end I've found there are no shortcuts with sharpening. What makes sharpening so effective is that it is done selectively and there is no other way to do that other than going through each one.

I generally offer clients in the region of 200-300 images from their wedding, the majority of which come out of Photoshop and end up in a web gallery and as printable JPGs on a DVD. I also currently offer them a selection of 60, which they can choose and I will print at 7.5x5 format. This is really easy by combining Lightroom and Photoshelter, where I host my web site and galleries.

The client email me their selection of sixty images, quoting the file number. I go back into Lightroom, where I have the final JPGs grouped as a collection within the particular wedding catalogue and export them out, this time as high resolution JPGs. Depending upon where I will do the prints, I can either export them directly to the printer's web site too, which is very handy. Otherwise, I have to take the exported files from LR and upload them via FTP.

Photoshelter is great generally for building and showing galleries to clients. You could just as easily put up a gallery, pretty much straight out of Lightroom (Photoshelter have their own Lightroom plugin) of images that aren't sharpened alongside a gallery of the same images sharpened. Or, using collections and tagging/flagging in Lightroom, you could mix them together in the same gallery.

Try a few things and see how you get on.

[John Hall]

My XD Card lost data fright episode

Just thought I let you know I had an error on my Sony XD Card and I had reformat drive message, something told me not to format fortunately done some searching on the net and came across http://www.bournemouthdatarecovery.com I told them that I was a photographer and need to get back my files.