My Post-Wedding Workflow

I know, I've got to do better keeping up on my blog...Anyway, people have asked me about my post-wedding workflow, so here goes.

It's important to me to go through each and every picture individually and make it just the way I want it. I refuse to do any batch editing, except sometimes for the goofy guest dancing stuff at the end of the reception. That of course takes lots of time, but it must be done. My wife doesn't so much like it when i spend all Saturday working and then come home and sit on the computer for 20 hours, but luckily the technology has come a long way in this department.

The key is always getting it right in the camera, but the PP work is important for stylizing, clean up and fine tuning. IMO, pictures rarely look professional coming straight out of the camera, even if the exposure and color is spot on. The standards are much higher this day in age, at least in some respects.

So here is my workflow, starting at the last photograph I take:

1) Protect the files until I can back them up. A guy I know got beat up and robbed of his gear coming home from a wedding. He lost $20,000 worth of gear. The stuff was replaceable, but the pictures were priceless. Fortunately for him, the bridge and the groom, he had his memory cards tucked in his sock.
2) Upload them to the computer, and back them up at least twice in separate locations, preferably in separate buildings.
3) Import all files into Adobe Lightroom and sort by capture time. If I have accurately synched the time on my camera with my assistant's, all the pictures should show up in the correct order.
4) Pick out the 10-20 best pictures, do a quick edit and post them as a sneak preview.
5) Cull, once for obvious outtakes and once for anything unflattering, with blinks, redundant or having technical problems. This will leave me with 4-500 pictures, depending on the length of the event.
6) Rename all the files to be event specific, in chronological order.
7) Preliminarily batch adjust groups of similar pictures. If a series of pictures were all taken with the same lighting conditions, I will adjust the first one and then sync the remaining pictures.
8) Go through each photo in LR and adjust the settings - white balance, exposure, recovery, fill light, black clipping, noise reduction, contrast curves, etc.
9) Stylize. For this, I make virtual copies of select images, so that I have one clean copy and one stylized copy for the client. I then apply a variety of presets that may work well with a particual image, and then do some more tweaking.
9) Go back through and check the full set, making minor tweaks.
10) Export from LR to .jpg's.
11) Select a small number of highlights for further refinement in Photoshop. PS, as opposed to LR, allows me to do "local adjustments", which is where I can erase distracting elements, touch up skin and add other effects. 99% of my pictures get no local adjustments, which is why I rarely go over to PS.
12) Upload the full gallery to my Smugmug web site, with highlights copied to the front end of the gallery.
12) Mail the CD to the client and begin working on the custom photo book, if purchased.

Voila! The whole process takes me about 1.5 hours of PP per every hour of shooting.