I thought I’d share my wedding photography workflow as are last workflow post proved to be quite popular. There are a few things I’ve missed out such as actually previewing images and proofing. What this is more concerned with is the start to finish computer work involved in what we do.

The is not a workflow for the faint hearted! It uses Photoshop CS4, Bridge and Aperture. The image retouching utilises Guy Gowan’s retouch action (which I’m a big fan of) and require LOTS of hard drive space so memory management is important.

Feel free to click on any of the thumbnails to enlarge the images.

Before we do anything images are downloaded to the desktop and backed up to a separate hard-drive using Time Machine. All of our images are shot on 4GB cards which makes it easier to backup and archive on DVD straight away.

Stage 1

All images are kept on a folder on the desktop. We do a quick fly through of the images in Bridge. Give useable images a star rating.

Stage 2

We select all of the ‘stared’ images and move them to a new folder. All other images are deleted (although still available on archived DVD and Time Machine for at least the next two weeks).

Stage 3

The new folder is opened in Camera RAW. Basic adjustments are made (with the highlight and shadow warnings ON) to even the exposure. This is not so much a ‘editing stage’ rather a digital negative processing stage.

Stage 4

I’m not going to open the images in Photoshop yet or do any further editing to change the images.

Hit Done.

Stage 5

Next we’ll set up a droplet in Photoshop – File>Automate>Create Droplet…

The Action we like to use as I mentioned is Guy Gowan’s Retouch Action.  We drag the whole folder onto the droplet and go and watch TV, take a walk or have a nap. This takes anything from 15 minutes to two hours so I just let the Action, Droplet and iMac do what it does best!

Stage 6

When I return/wake up/or when Veronica Mars is finished I have a nice big folder full of RAW and retouched PSDs files.

Stage 7

As I mentioned these files are BIG. The whole folder is archived on a separate external hard drive and the RAW files are removed from the desktop folder after I let Time Machine do it’s thing.

Once our Archive Hard Drives are filled they are  stored and labelled. Normally we fit about 10 complete weddings to a 2TB Hard drive. This cost for storage is factored into our wedding pricing.

Stage 8

After a quick scan in Bridge we make any additional changes needed in Photoshop. We don’t generally like to over Photoshop the images but it doesn’t hurt to throw in some effects here and there.

Stage 9

Now it’s time to properly organise the images for client previews and storybook design.

Images are imported into Aperture. We don’t store them in the Aperture library as it takes up far too much space so we just keep the files on the desktop.

There is a chance to add metadata information to the images at this point which is quite handy.

We don’t use Aperture to make any adjustments or cropping. Not that there’s anything wrong with Aperture but all the hard work has been already done in Photoshop.

Stage 10

Now it’s time to send our clients a little preview of what we have. We build our wedding clients a micro social network website where we’ll share the first preview images.

Aperture does also have an  upload to Facebook and Flickr function. I might also send a couple of images to Google Buzz to.

Obviously for the first set of preview images I want them to be watermarked, 72DPI and about 600 pixels at the longest side. This is all done with a export preset I have set up.

Stage 11

Once we have decided on a concept for the Storybook we’ll begin the design process. To make things a bit quicker and the page files smaller we’ll export the chosen files from Aperture to a JPGs. If we need to make any changes it’s easily done.

In the past we’ve used a few different album design programs but these days we use Photoshop more as a personal preference than anything else.

Stage 12

And we’re done!

The folder remains on the desktop till storybook album pages are approved and sent to print.

Album pages are also imported into Aperture for creating previews and JPGs.