Speed Up Your Workflow!

When I talk about how we are shooting 120+ weddings in a year, the first thing, without fail, I get asked is, “Do you edit all of those weddings?”

There has been a huge push in the wedding community to outsource anything you don’t like to do to free up time to do the things you love. But if you outsource your editing, in my opinion, you lose the ability to add your voice to your photos. Some people don’t care about that. But I do. I care tremendously about the final product. So, YES. I edit every single photo of every wedding.

The weddings I shoot, the weddings my associates shoot, and every image in between. The next question I get almost immediately is “How do you have the time to edit ALL of those weddings?!?” 

The question itself assumes so much! And I think reveals something about what a lot of us didn’t know when we got started as wedding photographers.

It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) take that long to edit a wedding!

Brace yourselves people… it takes me about an hour to edit an entire wedding. From the moment they finish importing to exporting, it takes me 60 minutes. And inevitably I get a whole array of responses when I tell other photographers that. From disbelief to “wow that’s amazing”. And here is the best part. I am going to give you 5 quick and easy things you can do starting now, that will reduce the time it takes to edit your weddings from 4-8 hours to 1. 

1. Turn everything off 
That’s right, turn off the distractions. Put your phone on do not disturb, turn off the internet and GET TO WORK. 

2. Be selective
This starts on the day of. On average I give the bride 500 finished photos. That means I am shooting around 600-700. That creates a much easier catalog to file through and cut down. The bride and groom don’t need 45 images of themselves cutting the cake!

That’s incredibly overwhelming to the bride and groom. Stop shooting so much and pay attention to what happens. This alone will cut your editing time in half. 

3. Abandon Photoshop
Lightroom was made for the professional photographer. It has every single tool you need to edit a wedding. If you aren’t using it, download the trial today. 

4. Use presets
There are a lot of great plugins and software you can use to edit your photos. But I since I want to keep my workflow within Lightroom I stick with Lightroom presets. You can spend the time to create your own, or there are many available for sale. 

I took the time and made some that I love, you can check them out here.

5. Stop obsessing over every little detail
When I edit the image i don’t spend but maybe a few seconds on each image. Part of this begins on the day of by nailing the shot in camera! Then later you will not have to spend time fixing your white balance, exposure and color.

If you get it right the first time, you can make minimal adjustments in Lightroom and move on to the next image. That isn’t to say sometimes you can’t. There are images I may absolutely fall in love with, or images that I am unsure of that I spend more time on. But don’t make it a habit. The majority of your editing should be quick with minor adjustments.

So that’s it! Five ways to speed up your editing.

When it takes hours to edit a wedding, it’s easy to keep putting off editing because it feels like a giant mountain you need to climb. As you get faster editing you’ll find you procrastinate less. That means your clients will get their photos faster and they will love that!