How to Cull and Edit Wedding Photos Quickly
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Loading... - Hamia Messaoudi
- 04 Aug 2022
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Time is money. That’s nothing we don’t already know but it’s probably the reason you’re interested and wondering how to cull and edit a wedding quickly. Maybe you’re overwhelmed with work during the wedding season or your clients are bugging you for a faster turnaround.
Being able to cull and edit a wedding quickly will allow you to get out from behind your computer and start shooting. I’m not suggesting you compromise the quality of your work but rather find ways to be more efficient in your business.
I’m going to walk through a 4 step process with some tricks and tips along the way to improve your editing speed without sacrificing quality.
Step 1. Get It Right in Camera
If there is one singular thing that you can do to decrease the time you spend editing your photos it’s to get the photos right the first time. Sure, our editing software can fix something that’s underexposed or improperly framed but that doesn’t mean it should. Your goal could be to take the photo correctly the first time so that you don’t have to edit it.
What if you had to show your unedited photos to the world? I’m not talking about every photo you shot but specifically the photos you deliver. How different are they unedited from the final version?
Another way that your shooting style can impact your culling is how patient you are while shooting. If you shoot haphazardly all over the place it can be really hard to cull your photos and remove duplicates. Conversely, if you stick with a shot until you nail it, then when you go back and cull you can quickly find the best shot of a cluster.
This brings us to culling which means reducing or controlling the size of something. There are different schools of thought regarding how many photos you deliver to your client. I believe it’s important to deliver your strongest images that cover everything important without miscellaneous duplicates.
You don’t want your client overwhelmed with decisions when they’re trying to decide which photos to print or put in their album.
Step 2. Culling Your Wedding Photography Images
Therefore, the first step to editing a wedding quickly is culling your images down from thousands to hundreds. This is hard. This is especially hard if we’re married to our work.
Culling is a challenge because you’re making thousands of decisions and you have to make them quickly or else it will take forever. The inclination is to be attached to every photo because of the intention you had when you took it. Instead, the goal is to focus on how the actual photo turned out.
Culling Mindset
The first step is to have a target image count, that will help you learn to be brutal with your cuts. If you can only select 1 out of 10 you’re going to be less attached to that mediocre photo. This might take some practice but once you do it a few times you’ll get better at it.
Next, you need to attune your mindset to the fact that your client will be focused on the photos you deliver, not the ones you don’t. You should therefore release and let go of the mediocre images and focus instead on the strong ones. If you get through the cull and come up short you can always go back and grab more but chances are you wont.
Another mindset hack is to think about the client and what you know about their preferences. If they love candids your image set might be more candid heavy, versus if they love details it might be more detail heavy. In general, avoid similar and duplicate photos as it’s your job to deliver the best images.
And lastly, you may need to reassure yourself that you did great. Looking at all your bad photos can be disheartening and you might start grasping at some mediocre ones because you’re worried you won’t have any good ones. Avoid this pitfall, only select the best photos and you can always go back and grab more (but I bet you won’t have to.)
Culling Process
When it comes to the process you’ll want to have a system for how you indicate which photos you’re selecting. I cull quickly in Photo Mechanic and then edit in Lightroom. I use star ratings to select photos in Photo Mechanic and then read that metadata into Lightroom. Read More...
