Tips for speeding up culling of wedding photos?

I'm trying to improve my workflow. I'm now using Photo Mechanic to cull images, and it is loads faster than Lightroom. I was wondering if anyone has any tips that they could share that helps their workflow as far as narrowing down to the photos you want to deliver to your client.

Thanks.

Don't take so many in the first place. Our workflow improved massively when we became more disciplined about what we shot (or didn't).

Rob

Well it comes down to what works best for you. I always take MORE photos than needed, gives you more to choose from which is important on things that you can't re-shoot, such as weddings.

As far as selecting the photos to deliver, I don't have an answer to that. I always go through each one individually, keeping the best ones. LR was great to me with it's cataloging feature, but I have not used Photo Mechanic. Guess I'm not much help .

BTW, what does it mean to "cull?"


EDIT: cull - to choose; select; pick

RobKirkwood wrote in post #10119881
Don't take so many in the first place. Our workflow improved massively when we became more disciplined about what we shot (or didn't).

Rob

That's good advice for a seasoned wedding photographer, but may not be good for anyone who is just starting out. If you're confident that you can get the shots you need in fewer shots, by all means decrease the amount of pictures you take. You'll save time and money, and lots of it.

Scott

I don't understand. You're just going to have to look at each one and decide. Nobody can tell you what the keepers will be.

You can delete the obvious failures in camera at the event (I do this during dinner). That will at least leave you with less to deal with at home.

RT McAllister wrote in post #10120028
I don't understand. You're just going to have to look at each one and decide. Nobody can tell you what the keepers will be.

Yes, true. There are different ways you can go about it. For example, you could first go through and flag any obvious rejects - out of focus, eyes closed, flash didn't fire. And then go through what's left more carefully. Or you could go through them once, and have some kind of rating system for obvious keepers, obvious rejects, and those in between. You might use star ratings or you might use color labels. Or something else. Just wondering what works best for others.

I'm with Rob here. Think about what would generate a picture sale, or make it into an album. Instead of the spray and pray method, create the shot visually, and as is the big thing with wedding photography, position yourself to capture the memorable moments by anticipating what is going to happen next.

I've cut the culling in half by being more selective of what I shoot. When I first started out, it wouldn't be abnormal to come home from an event with ~2600 images between myself and my partner. It was so repeatable, that we were always within 50 images of that 2600 mark.

Take an overall look of what you have a lot of images of. My guess is that you have somewhere around 1/3 of your images of drunken dancing. You still need to be ready for those memorable moments (like when the best man gets into a dance off with the bride), but the couple isn't going to put the drunken dancing pictures into an album. Yes. The friends in the pictures might buy one but you're not going to generate a lot of revenue from those images.

In regards to overall workflow, I watched an educational video from the PPA I believe it was and they recommended using flags in Lightroom instead of the star rating system. I'm not a fan of that, and use the stars.

1. Star - Obvious reject
   
2. Stars - Worst case use, heavy PS work
   
3. Stars - Presentable might require work
   
4. Stars - Album Worthy
   
5. Stars - Portfolio Worthy

Shaggymatt, I like the way you do yours. I have just rrecently started using photo mechanic and it is incredibly fast. I have a very basic way I go about mine though so far.

If I like the image, 1star. If I really like it I give it more. From there I go though all the one star images and cull that down. My way isn't going to speed up your workflow though.

I never though about shooting in manual mode as part of my workflow, but they suggested it as such in that video... In Lightroom you can do a cut/paste of your "Develop" settings and apply it to a group of images. If your grouping of images is all shot with the same camera settings, those first modifications will largely be applicable to that following group of photos that were shot with the same camera settings.

shaggymatt wrote in post #10120347

1. Star - Obvious reject
   
2. Stars - Worst case use, heavy PS work
   
3. Stars - Presentable might require work
   
4. Stars - Album Worthy
   
5. Stars - Portfolio Worthy

That's pretty much the same as my wedding workflow, which is a sticky in this forum.

I generally upload everything into photomechanic and simply flag the keepers with a star...one hand on the ONE key and the other hand toggling through with the arrow keys through the preview mode. After that, I sort them according to tag/color class and delete everything I didn't pick, and then I'll back up the keepers to an external before importing them into LR. Since you're already using PM, I'm not sure how much faster culling can ever get....

I only spend time rating for blog/slideshow/album once everything is exported from LR and I'm organizing in Bridge and everything is in the order it will appear in their gallery.

Hi Christina - I guess I'm one of the few in this thread using ACR and Bridge, but combined with shooting the job in Manual mode the flow works out pretty well.

I once tried to rate the images by color but that just slowed me down. For a full day wedding of 7-10 hours, I'll easily shoot about 700 reasonably unique images. I will probably cull that down to about 500-600 depending upon how hard I am on myself that day. I quickly browse through them in Bridge and the obvious OOF shots, flash misses, terrible compositions (waiter walks in front of camera) or other flubs get tossed immediately. Shots that are duplicates get tossed. Sometimes I'll take a series of portraits or groups and see little or no variation between the frames - no point in loading up the job with boring repetition so a number of those get deleted.

Shooting manually also makes it much easier to copy "like" exposure attributes across series of images. If you do two dozen groups in open shade, get the first exposure correct and repeat that across all of the shots. Later in Bridge, Lightroom, etc. you can copy the attributes from the first frame across the whole series and save a ton of time. - Stu

i am constantly deleting images off my cards all day any spare minute I have. then when I get home I cull them RUTHLESSLY. Just delete and don't look back. I only give them the best one or maybe two shots from each pose. Just be ruthless and it'll speed just about everything up in pp.

Just a point but considering how close the "delete shot" and "delete all" commands are on a canon DSLR (at least on my menu at least) I have always operated on the method of not culling anything whilst in the field and instead coming back to cull on the computer later. This way I won't accidentaly hit the delete all and thus totally negate that card for the rest of the day (till I can get image restore software in the computer to get the images back). Chimping and deleting quickly whilst possibly rushed at some stage (and maybe its a really cold church you are sitting in and your fingers are shaking a little) and you are risking an accident happening.

I would also say always make sure you have far more card space than you ever need on a shooting event - again this means you don't have to suddenly start rush deleting shots to free up some space - again a prime time when you might delete a key shot by accident or even hit the dreaded delete all!

I rarely delete off cards, I can do it more quickly and easily on the computer at home. Sometimes photos that look a bit crap on the camera can be ok when I see them large and process them a little.