Wedding Photo editing

[captainjack]

I was put forward from my college to shoot a wedding, this was my first on my own, most times, if they come through the college, they want it cheap as your a student (mature) and its not going to be the best, of venue.

I planned it as well, as I could. Checked the venue,register office, meet the couple twice, pre shoot. They only want the photos on a dvd
What I found was hard is, editing the images down quickly, is there a size of image I should be working to when editing, I have been using 2x3 crop in Pshop. I used a 50d and 7D and some have images have noise or that may be me because I am pixel peeping on the Mac.

Any one run through what you would do from getting the images on to pc/mac to a final image for print or dvd (just a rough guide).


Thanks for any advice..

Mods please move this if not in the correct place

 

[lensflair]

I import into lightroom, make backups of everything straight away. Go through images in LR and press p to flag picks. move picks to their own folder. Crop everything as is (3:2 ratio or 8x10). Make basic adjustments, noise reduction, sharpening a little as needed and export as tif or largest jpg, sRGB. Open tiffs in photoshop and do final adjustments, any retouching cloning etc. then save changes on a sperate layer in original tiff file. When they are all done I open them all and run an action that does output sharpening for print and saves a copy as maximum quality jpg into folder called print, and resized version for web, adds sig and saves a copy for web. average wedding about 30 hours post.

 

[captainjack]

Thanks for the that, can you tell why if I crop at 3:2 in bridge and then try to crop 8x10 it does not crop correct 8 x 10 does not seem, big enough to match if I am explaining myself correct.

 

[mattyh]

Put simply, 8x10 isn't a 3:2 ratio, so you're always going to lose some of the sides when cropping a landscape image, and some of the top when cropping a portrait image. It's just a different ratio to 3:2 (5:4, to be precise), so you HAVE to crop some of the edges off to make it fit. Better off doing a 9x6 or a 12x10 IMO

 

[Pb1of6]

I import into lightroom, make backups of everything straight away. Go through images in LR and press p to flag picks. move picks to their own folder. Crop everything as is (3:2 ratio or 8x10). Make basic adjustments, noise reduction, sharpening a little as needed and export as tif or largest jpg, sRGB. Open tiffs in photoshop and do final adjustments, any retouching cloning etc. then save changes on a sperate layer in original tiff file. When they are all done I open them all and run an action that does output sharpening for print and saves a copy as maximum quality jpg into folder called print, and resized version for web, adds sig and saves a copy for web. average wedding about 30 hours post.

You have a single action that does all this

 

[lensflair]

You have a single action that does all this

Yes, took me ages to work out how to do it. The caveat is you have to use a slightly different action for each aspect ratio and portrait/landscape orientation. I usually stick to 3:2 and 5:4 though. When Im working on the tif I never change the original layer name from 'background' and when I merge down my photoshop edits they are on a separate layer called background copy by default. The action duplicates the copy layer, applies smart sharpen at pre determined settings, changes the blending mode to luminosity, flattens image and converts to 8 bit, saves a copy into a folder on the desktop. This folder is called print and lives inside a folder called "staging'. The staging folder never get moved and the files inside the print folder get moved out to another folder manually at the end of the job. The next bit of the action is where it depends on whether the image is portrait or landscape. A landscape image is resized to 874 pixels wide ( a portrait image is resized to 594 pixels wide). Then the canvas size is increase by 26 pixels all the way around in white (could use whatever colour you like). Then the canvas size is increased again but only on the bottom of the image by 30 pixels. I have a small sig image on white which I have opened before I start this, select all and copy to the clipboard (its copied to the clip board for this whole process of all the images so its a single step I do before I start). The action pastes the image in the clip board onto the image its working on moves it into correct position. This is the other place the actions differ slightly, when I make the action I reposition the small sig image in the bottom left on the thick white border under the image area, photoshop records the exact position but it will only be in the right place when you use it on images of the same orientation and aspect ratio. The action flattens the image, selects all and strokes the outside border with a 1 pixel line of very dark grey. The action saves for web, and saves the image at 60 quality into the folder called web, which lives inside the staging folder. The image is closed but no changes saved so the tiff file stays untouched.

I actually have an action that stops after pasting the sig image so I can position manually if it is a custom ratio, I have another action that just does the final flattening, stroke image, save for web etc so I can run the action - manually position sig - run the finishing action. There is two of these, one for anything in portrait and one for landscape.

I hope all that makes sense, its very specific to how I want my web images with sig etc. They end up being 900 pixels wide with a white border thicker at the bottom, sig in bottom left, and a thin dark line around the whole thing. I always have them on a white background on the web hence the black line. Of course you can do lots of other things like putting a sig over the image, theres probably even better ways to do it that will work on any image regardless of aspect ration, but I haven't found them or worked out how to do it myself yet.