Photoshop Tuesday - How to Organize Your Photos for Your Customers

Note:  Kirk is "the Affordable Full time Professional Wedding Photographer Winsdor,  Ontario".  Here is the Link to KW Masters Photography.

Introduction:

When we shoot a Wedding, we will get 1000-2000 images that need to be organized.  Today I will share what we do and how we try to make this process user friendly.

Discussion:

We process and check all photos for things like white balance, exposure, sharpness and many other things.  Because we batch process, it is easy to set up a file system to separate the photos according to the day's events.  For example, we have Bride's Home, Groom's Home, Wedding, Post Wedding, Reception.  We store all images in their respective folder.  I use TIFF format with no compression loss.

Lightroom:

The next step is to cull the shots.  We use Lightroom to load the shots from each Folder.  Before we do this, we make a new Lightroom Cat. specifically for each couple and save it in the couple's unique Top Level Folder for future reference.

Lightroom makes it easy to help us select which images we want and to discard the ones that we don't want.  We NEVER work on the Master-Original Images.  Only a processed copy.  When importing the images into Lightroom, we have the opportunity to run a script but because of our earlier post processing, we normally don't use any scripts.  There are 100's of scripts available that you can use or you can make one of these scripts up for yourself.  Because Lightroom can't do the same function like sharpening the images as well as DXO, we basically run a script in DXO.  We can delete some of the originals in DXO that we know are not use-able.  I like to NOT delete duplicates here so that they are available if needed.

Once we have spent hours culling the lot, we may also add some Lightroom touchups to some of the images.  Always explain ahead of time to your customer that it is standard Photography practice to cull your work and only show acceptable images.  This will avoid problems down the road.  We post this on our website.

Preparing the DVD

The DVD needs to be arranged in a clear logical manor for your customer to review and use.  Your customer may have purchased the Rights to print your images.  You may have to modify the exif file to remove any references.  We never put our Logo on these files.  To my knowledge, the maximum file size that can be printed is 7 MB.  Images to be used for web emails, FB, etc can be less than 0.5 MB.  For printable images, 4 MB should work well as you have already corrected exposure and white balance.  Always use a calibrated monitor when your adjust and check the white balance of the images.  It is always a Good Idea to give your customer small size images in addition to printable images.  You may want to include images that you have posted to your website with your logo.

So how do you take the culled images in TIFF format and change them to JPEG images?  There are two or more ways to do this.  You can run a script file in PS or use this tool in Lightroom.  I believe this tool is also available in Bridge.  Simple select all of your images in Lightroom and go to the menu and select Export.  This screen should show up.

We just love this tool.  It does it all for us.  For each folder, like the Bride's Home folder, we can rename all of the images  Bride-1.jpg to to Bride-250.jpg.  We do the same for all of the other folders.  At the same time, we can Limit the file size to in this case 4 MB for printing.  We NEVER crop these images.  We don't know what format the customer wants to print these images.  A 5x7 or 8x10 or some other size.

Once all of the images are processed, we transfer them to the DVD and makeup a custom cover for the Customer to store the DVD in.  The customer now can easily select their photos from these folders and tell us what they have selected.

Summary:

So here is our easy process to produce the DVD for the customer.  We stress to the customer that that is NOT the end of the story.  When we print images, we always Photoshop them and enhance the photo immensely.  As you can see, preparing the DVD is a very time consuming process.  Every image must be viewed and in some cases, tweaked to look their best.  We never give away our Photo-shopped images.  We have spent years perfectly our art of photo touch-ups to make the final images "pop".

• Kirk is  a Professional Wedding Photographer in Windsor, Sarnia, London and Southern  Ontario Canada.   In appreciation if you would be so kind as to give a G+ and a Facebook Like KW Masters Photography on his Facebook page.  

• View Kirk Masters Profile
• Vistek.ca for your professional camera needs.