Our Editing Process
It occurs to Landon and I that people sometimes wonder how we do what we do. They see us diligently taking photos during the shoot, and then they receive their finished product a week or so later. But what happens in between those times? How do we get from these giggly fools taking pictures to the beautiful polished pictures? What is our secret?
Well, it is no secret. It is complicated hard work. Not complicated in that the work itself is hard. More complicated in the sense of how our timing works. Both Landon and I love to take the pictures and have our own creative flow when editing. This can be tricky to make sure both of us love the final images we are presenting. Especially when I work our business full time and Landon still works an 8 to 5 job. Then throw in the fact we are planning a wedding, raising a daughter, and trying to make time for each other. Why do we do all this craziness? Because we LOVE what we do! We love taking breath-taking pictures that even startle us. And somehow, we make it all work.
It works because we work! And boy do we work hard! Once the fun of the photo shoot is over, I immediately take our cameras home to upload all the images to our creative cloud. I don’t wait even a day to do this and run the risk of anything happening to the photos. Once they are on my computer they are saved in four different locations. Two different cloud storages and two hard drives. My absolute biggest fear is losing images. After I know I have them all saved I can sleep easier at night.
Once I have all the photos saved to my liking, I set up a bunch of folders to help streamline our organization. I keep a main folder with the date and the name of the family or individual we took photos of. Inside that folder I have three additional folders. The first folder is for Rejects. When I say rejects that only means we took a blurry photo or the lighting wasn’t perfect. However, I only put photos in there I can not fix with editing. The next folder is Possible Edits. This is where the raw images go I plan on editing or reviewing further. The last folder stays empty the longest. This is my Final Edits folder. Once my long process is over I move the perfect photos into this folder. Only photos that make it to this folder get shared with the clients.
Once I have the three folders set up I start sorting the photos. This is a quick over view of all the photos we took that day. If the photo is somewhat workable I put it in the Possible Edits folder. If I can tell that I don’t like these photos or I won’t be able to correct the problems, it is then Rejected. The amount of time doing this depends on how big the shoot was. We had one Senior Pictures shoot with over 900 pictures. This sorting process took me a bit of work. It is not completely perfect because at any time during the editing I could decide I don’t like a photo and move it to the Rejects. This really just gets rid of the photos I don’t want to waste any time on.
After the sorting is completed the editing process can begin. I am not going to give away any secrets here, though. Before I dive in too far I do like to look over the pictures with Landon so we both can get a feel for the pictures we like and don’t like. We also talk about the client’s style and how we want to show that in the pictures as well. I don’t want to give a rustic feel to pictures to we took in the city for someone who is very urban. This is the best point we have to remind each other what we are trying to achieve with these photos. Then I can really dive in deep with my editing. I pick all similar shots and edit those together. Similar as in same pose, same area, same lighting depending on the shoot. Having all these similarities make the process much quicker. I pick only a few of my favorites from the same pose that way the clients doesn’t get 10 of the same exact photo. I can also adjust all of their lighting together if need rather than one photo at a time.
Once I complete my portion of the editing process I change the flag icon from yellow to blue to signal to Landon it is his turn to look over the photos. (We use Adobe Lightroom and it comes with different ways to rank and flag photos to signal what stage they are in. We use this to keep track of our photos and let each other know where they are at in the process) I have already handled the bigger parts of the editing (getting rid of blemishes and cropping) so now Landon looks over the photos to 1) make sure I didn’t miss any details 2) make sure the photos match our style and the clients style and 3) make sure you can see his artistic flare as well. Landon likes to make additional copies of photos and mess around with the colors or make them black and white. It gives the clients additional photos that they may not have known they wanted. At this point we meet and talk about the photos again in case there happened to be something I wanted Landon to edit in the photos or if he has any questions about the work I had already done. When Landon had completed his process, he flags the photos green signaling to me he is done with them.
The last stage of the game is to prep them for the client. I download them into two sets. The first is specifically made to be viewed on a screen (computer, phone, etc.). The second is specifically used for printing the photos. The reason there is a difference is because photos for print have a lot more DPI (dots per inch) which ends up being a lot more information. You need all of that information when printing them so if you increase the size of the print, it doesn’t distort or blur your pictures. However, screens all have a much smaller DPI anyway so you don’t need that extra information on the pictures. It will slow down all of your load times, which means if you are putting these on a website or social media, it will take longer to load them. Plus, it isn’t necessary to have that extra information you can‘t see anyways. Since our main packages for our clients is digital copies we make sure they have the pictures in formats they can use. I download both sets of copies onto a thumb drive, then drop that in the mail for the clients. We also set up an online album for the clients to view their photos while waiting for the thumb drive. I am not a very patient person so I completely understand how hard it is to wait to get your pictures. I try to make it easier on the clients and let them have a sneak peek first.
There you have it! That is our complete process for editing our photos. I edit during the day and Landon edits at night. By the end we have beautiful pictures we are proud to send out. Please don’t be fooled. This sounds like a huge lengthy progress; however, most photos get an average of 2-4 minutes worth of editing. If it takes longer than that, then we didn’t take very good photos. Also, we list that it averages to 15-20 photos per half hour of shooting, but if you are a super photogenic person who absolutely loves to have your picture taken, it could be so many more than that. We don’t stop when we hit our quota, we give you every possible photo we have. It ends up being more work for us but these are your photos and you deserve all of them.
If you have any questions about our process or think you can improve it for us, leave a comment below!