Our Workflow After Capture

From time to time we get asked from other photographers what goes on after we capture images in the camera in my studio production group. There are so many individual steps that I’d like to go through in detail in future posts, but I thought I’d give you a general idea of our process.

First and foremost, we make sure to Archive those images and get them offsite! We have one PC that is dedicated to creating DVD backups from the memory cards we use. It burns the DVDs, creates labels and stores it on our network drives. We have over three terabytes (as of right now) of storage for our photography files. Yes, we shoot in RAW and wouldn’t have it any other way!

After the Archive comes the Edit. We look through all the images to remove any that have blinks and select the best from the session or wedding. We’re looking for images that best tell the story of the wedding or portrait that we were shooting.
Then, we import all the images into Adobe Lightroom and begin the color balance work. We love Lightroom and I’ll talk more about it in another post, but it’s been one of the best software purchases we’ve done.

We use some custom presets that we’ve created here to help us achieve the looks we want and then we tweak the images further until we get exactly the look we’re going for.

Then, we renumber the edited images and export them from Adobe Lightroom as Jpegs. Every image we produce here has a Job number and a sequential number assigned to it. So, some day in the future if a client brings us a photograph, we will just turn it over and see that it was “1345_0046” as the file name (our lab prints the file names on the back of our photographs). We will go to our files and look up job “1345” and get image number 0046 from the disc and reprint it.

After that, we take the color corrected images into Adobe Photoshop and run actions on them for selective sharpening and other color work. Then we do any final density and contrast adjustments, dodge and burn and vignette. When we look at an image, we’re looking for the story it tells. If there’s something in that image that is distracting from the story, we want to down play it by burning it in or take it out completely with the clone stamp tool.

Then, we post the images online or create a disc for our wedding clients and store a copy of the final Jpegs in a physical file folder we keep for all our jobs.
We keep all of our job information on a custom designed online database that we created to keep track of things in our studio.