Introduction:
Running a Wedding Photography business requires an excellent work flow. You must preview over 1000 to 1500 images per wedding. You must also provide a value added service for every image that is printed.
Today, the modern dark room is the computer work station. We have two work stations with dual monitors. Both have color calibrated 24 in monitors and Quad processors. I personally use an I7 Quad at 3500 MHz with 8 GB on board - Windows 7. The problem is that a lot of programs are NOT yet written for multiple processors and run slowly. This cost us a lot of time and time is money. For example, DXO used to take quite a bit of time to process each image. Recent program changes have significantly changed that and we are extremely pleased about that. One of the things that software developers do is to use the processor on your video card. So it is a good idea to have a good quality and relatively up to date video card. You don't have to spend a fortune. A card costing around $200 mark normally will do a great job. The side benefit is your gaming will be improved at the same time.
We have spent hours in the past working on one photo. There of course is no profit to spending that amount of time on one photo. If we have a valuable image, one that the customer Must have, then we will spend what ever it take to make that image look good.
Masters-Tip: Upgrade your computer hardware every 3-4 years and look at performance. Your input and output reads are important so one of the fast SSD drives is a must have today.
Of course we have several tricks up our sleeves to help us cut the time back. Time is always the enemy during the wedding day and in post. That is why we strive our utmost to get it right in the camera. We have several key software programs that help us.
These are:
1. DXO Optics Pro 8
2. Lightroom 3 (soon to be upgrades to 4)
3. Photoshop CS 5.5
4. Various Plugins for 32 bit Photoshop.
Some of you will be asking, why no PS 6? The reason that we are slow to change is that we don't want to lose our 32 bit Plugins and buy the 64 bit versions if the 32 bit ones are working well.
Today's Photoshop Plugin is NIK Viveza 2
With this plugin, you can brighten dark faces or enhance the color of flowers.
They use what they call their U-Point Technology. It works. When ever we see a face and is dark, particularly in a group photo, we fire up Viveza 2 and adjust the sliders accordingly.
First you must put a control point over your subject. Then you must adjust the reach of the control by moving the slider. Sometimes we can adjust the brightness on more than one face at a time.
Masters-Tip: I believe in the 20-80% Law, sometimes referred to as Parato's Law. When I adjust the brightness of the control point I make it a point not to exceed 20% and normally target 15% or less.
Photoshop touchups are the summation of sometimes over 20 tweaks per image. These are small tweaks but the net result is eye popping.
If you don't have this program yet, you can try to use the adjustment brush in Lightroom or make up selection masks in Photoshop. Again it is all about saving time on each image.
We give this Plugin our: Recommended Rating
Kirk is a Professional Wedding Photographer in Windsor 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. You only have to do this once and add your likes and G+ per post.
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