Being a wedding photographer is not an easy profession. In addition to physical endurance, you need the ability to find a common language with all kinds of people, developed artistic taste, skills in staged and reportage photography, and good knowledge of programs for post-processing. During one wedding, the photographer takes an average of 2 to 3 thousand photos. Can you imagine how much time it takes to process the material? Actually not so much!
We’ve put together for you proven tips and life hacks to speed up your wedding photos significantly. This means clients won’t have to wait long for photos, and you’ll be able to take more orders!
Take care of the quality of your photos while you’re still at the photoshoot
Today’s retouching tools can work wonders. For example, the retouchme.com/service/body-hair-removal-app allows you to remove unnecessary vegetation from the body, preserving the natural texture of the skin. But if you “conjure” over each of the hundreds of photos, the processing time would be exorbitantly long. Moreover, it is possible to minimize the amount of time required for retouching, even at the stage of shooting!
• Provide yourself with the same lighting in every location
If you are constantly moving from sun to shade and back in search of the best shot, you will get a large number of heterogeneous (and not necessarily successful) images. You won’t be able to apply the same settings to all of them. Of course, a clearly beautiful shot is not worth missing just because you need to retouch it separately, but most of the photos at each location are better to shoot in the same conditions.
• Immediately set the appropriate settings, take care of framing
It is desirable to master the manual mode of shooting so that each series of frames had the same settings and fit one mode of exposure correction. Experienced wedding photographers often take two cameras with preset parameters: one for working indoors and the other for outdoors.
During the shooting stage, you should immediately pay attention to the horizon line, white balance, and ISO. On the fly select cropping variants and remove the trash from the camera field of vision. Otherwise, you will get tired of fixing it all in editors.
Limit the number of “raw” frames.
Try to fit your wedding into 300–500 shots instead of several thousand, the large proportion of which will be taken just in case. This way the initial selection will go much faster.
Choose your photos right
The first stage is often the most voluminous. It is recommended to divide it into several steps.
- Preparation
Transfer all material to your hard drive and format thumb drives immediately to be ready for your next use.
- Flexible Photo Selection
Use special programs. This can be Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, etc. This way you can review the material once before you actually start retouching. Rate each shot on a 5-point scale. 5 stars — the best photos, suitable for portfolio use and for thorough artistic processing. 4 stars — good photos that will be processed with automatic color and light correction. 3 stars — pictures that raise doubts, but you don’t want to delete them for some reason.
Ruthlessly send technical defects and duplicates to the trash (leave only the most natural variant). Put color markers corresponding to locations, so you can quickly distribute photos in the thematic folders.
- Photoshoot demo
Choose a few photos that stretch for 5 stars and process them first. Send them to the newlyweds a couple of days after the wedding. Customers will be grateful because they will be able to appreciate your skills immediately and post the photos on social media. You can work on the rest of the photos at a more relaxed pace to send them out in a month, for example.
Use the techniques of professionals to retouch your pictures
- Take one frame from a specific location, set its correct settings: volume, exposure, and color correction, cropping in one of the programs (CaptureOne, Lightroom, CameraRaw). Apply the preset to all photos of the series.
- Process each location in this way if there are no significant differences in light.
- Go through all the photos one by one, making adjustments if the preset was not very good for a particular photo.
- Turn your RAW files into JPEGs. Photo post-processing programs usually have built-in converters.
- Pictures that are designed for deep retouching, art processing and transfer to Photoshop. Here, it will already be possible to work with highlights, alignment of facial colors, etc. Many photographers prefer to further tone the frames to convey the author’s style, as well as to make the photo shoot visually more coherent.
And one last piece of advice: Renaming the processed images is considered good. For example, instead of DSC0001, it would be olga_artem001. This will make it even more pleasant for the customers to receive the images.