cropping for wedding work

Wilt wrote in post #12280269
Thanks for pointing this out. It would seem that you have to use SmugMug, have all of your photos on that system, and give access to people to that account and they do the cropping on line, and then order prints...Is that right?

So what do you do for people reviewing a CD or DVD full of photos, off line and not connected to the web? (after all, many folks have slow modem access only, even now, because of living in areas where high speed DSL is simply not available...I could not get high speed DSL mid-way between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, because I was too far from some access point, and that only changed finally about 7 years ago!

You upload to albums, then give clients the password or link to that album, then they order prints. If they order a 17x12 or something strange, then they're prompted to crop, or at least review the default crop provided for them.

As far as off-line, that's a great point, I have no answer for you.. I've never encountered that scenario. I live in a major city, so my workflow for ordering revolves around people having high-speed access. You're right though, for many photographers in rural areas, the online proof / ordering may not work well at all.

Shockey wrote in post #12273437
If you are worried about it save the original uncropped versions, you can always go back to it later if the client should want a print size you are unable to accomodate with the way you cropped it.

This is what I do. I do all my editing on the original size file and save that file.

BrandonSi wrote in post #12280809
As far as off-line, that's a great point, I have no answer for you.. I've never encountered that scenario. I live in a major city, so my workflow for ordering revolves around people having high-speed access. You're right though, for many photographers in rural areas, the online proof / ordering may not work well at all.

It was with a lot of chagrin that I (8 years ago) previously was aware of being in the very center of a metropolitan area with 7 million people, living literally one mile from a small university and two miles from Oracle and ten miles from Stanford U, yet I could not get high speed DSL (I could get more expensive low speed DSL at the time). So if it could happen to me, it can easily happen to others.

For weddings 2:3 99.9% of the time. There's no point throwing pixels away.

So what's a good processing workflow? I've just started doing shoots. Say you've got 150 raw files. Go through and do all your processing at 2:3. Then maybe make duplicates on ones that would be good candidates for 5x7 or 8x10s?

In Adobe Lightroom I've set up a seperate folder/export setting for "creative crops" and export to DNG.

Why would you crop at all? If my customers want to crop they can do it themselves, or they can order prints for me to do for them. I photograph weddings.

tim wrote in post #12293964
Why would you crop at all?

To maintain control?

tim wrote in post #12293964
If my customers want to crop they can do it themselves

I've seen that go wrong way too often...