PP Time Question for Wedding Pros

I shoot a few weddings for friends, and as an old school newspaper film guy, my weddings don't tend to have much advanced pp work. Pretty much straight photojournalism stuff. Old habits die hard.

I do love some of the processing that I see in the forums, and have a question about the time spent on the work.

Do you select your #1's to display to the client with minimal pp work done, or do you spend a lot of time on a photo only to have it rejected. Of course, I know there are some that are going to be a hit, and I think it is wise to present those photos in a finished state. I'm just not sure how to balance time vs money, and how much time to spend working on an image that may not sell. My photoshop skills are pretty basic at this point. I have Lightroom and old photoshop 7, which I am slow at.

So tell me, how do you handle this?

Thank you in advance for any response.

Any samples I send a client are either finished or close to it (color balance tweaks, etc.). I don't send too many samples, but if I was going to put up photos for online purchasing/ordering I would only put up photos that were finished. Lightroom is great for workflow.

Don't have any suggestions about proofing, but I expect that if I was going to do heavy processing on a selected number of photos picked out by the B&G, I would post only color/exposure corrected versions for them to select for advanced work because of time involved. However, I could make the selection myself instead, but I would be afraid to miss something important to the couple.

I'm a bit old school myself, so I understand where you're coming from.

All of my online gallery and 4x6 book proofs have general finishing in ACR: adjustments for WB, exposure, contrast, etc. As much as I'd love to invest more time in them, I won't spend more than a couple of hours "proofing" these 400-600 images. Now, when they DO make their final album selections, that's where I'll put the photoshop post processing effort. - Stu

Anything that my clients see has had the full editing works done to it first. That way they get exactly what they have seen.

I don't do anything fancy, same as Stu really. For the album I do things like temporary blemish removal, I might minimise dark circles under eyes or spots on clothes, tidy up a background occasionally, but really I don't feel the need to do much PP. I feel it distracts from the images, gets rid of any consistency, plus it takes a bunch of time.

My whole approach is photojournalistic- i tell the story of their wedding day through the photos i take. I interfere as little as possible, and keep the posed pics to a minimum.To that end, I select around 150-200 that tell the story and PP them up until they are finished. That's what i show the clients when i meet them again after the wedding. So i don't offer a traditional "proof" book like most photographers do. If they select a package with an album, i do predesign the album before I meet up with them after the wedding, and they have some input into the final design.

I offer them high rez files on a disc, and if they have any special requests for PPing any pics not selected by me in the album or slideshow, i'm happy to do it.