We have been getting a lot of questions about our entire editing process so we thought we would share what we do after photographing a wedding, elopement and even our adventure sessions and engagements. We have a whole workflow to streamline the process and we do it the same, every time. This isn’t the only way to do it, but this is what works for us and the simplest way we can share it for you guys. Grab a cup of coffee and check it out.

Here are the steps to our process:

UPLOAD ALL IMAGES TAKEN TO HARD DRIVE

This process takes about 4-8 hours typically, depending on elopement/wedding coverage time and how many photos were taken.

BACKUP TO 2-3 EXTERNAL DRIVES

Always backup to 2-3 more drives for safety reasons. You don’t want to have something fail and you don’t want to lose any important images. This can take a while also, maybe 2-8 hours, depending on the speed of your drives.

BACKUP TO ONLINE (if you can)

Use Backblaze/Crashplan/etc if you can. It’s so cheap and totally worth it. We can’t because we live in a mountain town, with really slow internet. When we first moved here, it said it would take 1.5 years to get fully backed up. That definitely wouldn’t work. If you live in a bigger place, definitely get an online backup. This can take a while, but you can have it run in the background and won’t really know it’s going on. It can bog down your internet though, so definitely watch that. We used to let it run all night, while we were sleeping, so it didn’t affect our internet speed.

IMPORT IMAGES TO LIGHTROOM

This could take a bit also, but while you import, you can do something else productive while you are waiting of course. Or you can just watch Netflix and catch up on some shows right? We recommend 1:1 importing, so after they are imported, it works without a lag.

CULL ALL THE IMAGES

Culling basically is just selecting the images you want to deliver. This can take about 8 hours+ depending on how many images there are. We have 4 cameras, so going through all the images takes a bit. We reject (click x) all of all the unusable images during this time.

EDIT THE IMAGES

After culling, we always suggest to take a 1-2 day breather. It just gives you a little refresher before starting all the edits. We typically import with a preset, but that always doesn’t work for every lighting situation, so we still need to tweak to our liking and the light settings.

We don’t do crazy edits, but we will edit in photoshop if something is needed. We also make almost all images in b/w and color for our couples, so they will have each.

EXPORT THE IMAGES

We export the images to folders on our desktop. We like to organize all the images by time of day, ie: Getting Ready, Pre Ceremony, Ceremony, Formals, Couples Name, Reception, etc. It helps for downloading and making it easier to find the images.

UPLOAD THE IMAGES

After everything is in order and exported, we upload to our software (Cloudspot). We have also used Pass and Pixieset in the past and they are great also. They all have different plusses and minuses to them.

This can take a couple hours and the majority of time, we have to go where the internet is faster for uploading. If not, it would take probably a week+ to upload the images. ;)

BACKUP THE EDITS

We also backup the edits on the different external drives so they are saved in multiple locations. It’s just better to have multiple backups and we definitely believe that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

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Hope this helps you guys! Let us know if you have any questions at all!

Shannon+Jake