The Workflow Post

In an effort to help clients, I’m going to post my own workflow for an average wedding.

Get home, download cards into a premade folder. I have a master folder for each wedding client, with both wedding and engagement folders each containing the following folders: Album, Blog, Developed, LR Catalog, Orders, PickPic, Raw Keep, Raw Orig, Slideshow. I copy this master folder to the client folder and then download the raw images into the Raw Orig file. I copy to an external drive at this point.

I cull in Photo Mechanic, pressing the number “1″ for the keepers. I then transfer the keepers to the Raw Keep folder.

I open Lightroom, create a new catalog for this client, and save it in the LR Catalog folder, and then import into Lightroom all the images in the RAW Keep folder. Using Quikeys, I quickly process the wedding, rating my favorite images as I go using the increase rating key (before I used Quikeys, I just pressed “1″ to do this). Then I export into the Developed folder. — These are the images my clients receive if they have a package including the hi-res files.

I run a Photoshop batch resizing the images to 600px on the long side, and then upload those to my server for the PickPic cart. While those are uploading, I go back to the images rated with 1 star, and enhance these images, saving into the slideshow folder and the blog folder. At this point, I create the wedding or engagement’s blog post, and shortly thereafter the slideshow.

Super Duper backs up my Image Drive each night… so the raw files are always in three places: two internal hard drives and an external hard drive. I gave up burning DVDs of RAW files a while ago.

Next comes the album! I’ve already retouched my favorite images, and draw mostly from there. Of course, I sometimes go back to the Developed folder for an image that wasn’t my favorite but still necessary for the album.

Once finished, I copy the album .psd files to the external, and run another Photoshop batch to resize the images for project workroom so my client can view the album.