Long overdue update
I have been so crazy busy lately that I have been totally ignoring my blog and I feel terrible about it. In the last two months, I have shot 16 weddings and many large corporate events which has been keeping me hopping.
Many people may not realize what is involved after I show up to their wedding and shoot it till the time they see their proofs, so I thought it may be a good idea to explain the process. After the wedding is shot, all the memory cards are transferred to our main system, backed up to our file server and then a copy on DVD is made so we have lots of copies of each wedding. These files represent the starting point and are usually in the neighborhood of 1500 – 4000 images or up to 22GB of data. These files are then edited to pick out the best ones and we usually end up with between 500-800 images we feel are the quality we want to present. The other images tend to be lighting tests, crazy expressions, eyes closed or duplicates so we don’t want to show these ones, but we always keep copies of everything. Once we have the keepers, these files are loaded into Photoshop and are individually colour corrected and made perfect in terms of colour, contrast, saturation and exposure. After we get to this point, all the images are converted from the camera raw files to usable jpegs. Many photographers choose to skip these very time consuming steps and shoot jpegs right out of the camera but we find the extra time and effort is well worth it in terms of the final quality of the images. When we have our final images in a usable format we then apply various Photoshop techniques that enhance the skin tones, colours of the sky and grass and give the rich look to the images that I am known for. When we are satisfied with these final images we then convert some of these to black and white and sepia so you can see what is possible. The final steps are to apply some Photoshop actions to create the unique borders I have on my proofs and to convert to my lab’s (Pikto’s) colour space to ensure perfect results. Then all we have to do is pick up the images form the lab and put them in albums for the couples. This whole process takes on average 20 hours per wedding and while some of this time is automated, we feel it is necessary to give the very best quality to all our clients. Hope this helps with those who wonder what goes on behind the scenes and please feel free to ask any questions you may have about our workflow.