I am about to give my first wedding to the Bride and Groom tomorrow night. I have searched around the forums for my answers, but wanted some advice from you active exporters as well
I did all my post processing in Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4. I have marked the selects in GREEN and am doing exporting for the following:
1. PRINTING - I was going to export in TIFF, sRGB. After researching a bit, this seems to be the best option if the B&G are doing their own printing and you don't know what printer they will be using. Is this what you would typically do?
2. WEB FRIENDLY - I was going to do these in small JPEGS with watermarks for their Facebooks etc. Sound good?
3. JPEGs OR TIFFs - We agreed on giving them all the stuff I shot, edited and non-edits on DVD. I was going to give these in either JPEG or TIFFs. What do you suggest? *** Next wedding I will NEVER agree to these terms. As my first, I made a mistake, but have to stick to the contract on this one, this time only. Will only give edited images moving forward.
Appreciate any feedback on this process. Since this is my first wedding that I am exporting, I hope to get better with the whole export process as time moves forward, but in the meantime need some advice.
1. don't bother with tiffs. just give them high-res jpgs
2. yes. fine.
3. i would never give away non-edits. eek. and how are these different than the images in #1?
Give all of the images some form of editing, basic LR should do for a majority of them, and send them on a disk at full res jpg is what I do. I tag 'em on FB - they are able to default them that way and it gets you some free marketing.
In regards to 3. I learned from this. I will not provide ALL images again on the next wedding. This particular wedding, since it was my first, I learned a lot about what to change.
Appreciate your help.
Forgot to ad, on your web friendly shots, do you add watermarks ?
Even if it was in your contract, I still wouldn't give them any non-edited shots. how many edited shots are you giving them... chances are, if you are giving them a bunch of edited, that make up a large portion of the day, covering all aspects, they'll be so happy and overwhelmed that they might not realize that you didn't give them EVERY thing.
That is assuming it was just something listed in your contract... if there was a specific conversation about this and they had you add it or you already pointed it out to them, then they'll be looking for it and you are better off just delivering everything.
sandierox wrote:
1. PRINTING - I was going to export in TIFF, sRGB. After researching a bit, this seems to be the best option if the B&G are doing their own printing and you don't know what printer they will be using. Is this what you would typically do?
A lot of places they might take them to get them printed cannot deal with TIFFs. JPG only.
+ on JPGs only. Tiff doesn't really make any sense, unless you want to give the photos in 16 bit.
JPG with compression set to 10 or higher will be identical to the tiff.
I'm guessing that you are not delivering the completely screwed up shots (very oof, uncle bob's elbow covering bride's face etc)? If so make sure your numbering is sequential, otherwise you might have inquiries about the missing files.
It's funny I just went through my own wedding pictures, and our photog gave us all the images also. Personally I don't see the point. Only give them shots that are decent. If you put the images that don't meet grade out there you're just hurting your own image.
Point 1 just hi res JPG,
Point 2 sounds good and free advertising never hurts.
2. not sure what the settings are for Small Jpeg, but I resize to 640 pixels. Works great. I don't watermark. To me, a watermark is to prevent someone from printing that file, but you've already given the high rez files, so what's the point of the watermark? I think branding is good, but a watermark on hundreds or thousands of images seems tacky.
3. Everyone has already said this is not a good idea. I agree. If you want to watermark images in order to get extra marketing benefit, then you shouldn't give out bad images. Any gain from the watermark is being lost by having crappy pics of yours floating around.
gfrasur wrote:
..
2. not sure what the settings are for Small Jpeg, but I resize to 640 pixels. Works great. I don't watermark. To me, a watermark is to prevent someone from printing that file, but you've already given the high rez files, so what's the point of the watermark? I think branding is good, but a watermark on hundreds or thousands of images seems tacky. ...
You don't want a client to make the mistake of printing a web size image and thinking your work is worse than it is.
Non-edit can also mean the best of the bunch. Often times I don't edit images because I shot it correct in camera to begin with. Why does so many of today's photographers feel that editing has to be done. Get it right in camera and there is no editing to do. Sure, you can enhance an image, but I would think that image is a really good image to begin with. Delete out the crap images. Think about this, would you deliver an image of the floor that you shot simply because you work making sure your flash woke up from sleep mode? Is that an un-edited image or not? Treat eyes closed, looking away, bad posture images the same way.
In other words, "editing" should not be confused with enhancing or adding your "artists" touch.
As for point 3, I know why she wanted them. As far as I understand she wanted to just check out al the non-selects so that nothing was thrown out. I agreed to this, but will not be doing this again in the future. I don't like that she's looking through all my "crap", but since I've agreed, I am holding my word.
I have decided to give hr 1000px at the highest height of the crap shots, also saved in JPEG quality 75%. Is it wrong of me to ask her to keep the "crap" shots to herself so that she can look at them, but not be posting them around? Honestly, of the 115 shots that I did up for her, I don't think she'll find a need for these additional shots anyway, but I will hold my word this time.
Appreciate the feedback. I finished my DVD burn last night, complete with a homemade jewel case cover which actually looks great! I meet with the couple this evening for a final preview and I will be doing this via a Lightroom slide show.
I agree and it reminds me of a wedding I shot about 2-3 years ago. The Dad was a nice guy but it turns out he was very emotional throughout the whole wedding process - guess giving away his baby girl was harder than he expected. When we met to delliver the album, he was the first one to look through the album with his wife and newly married daughter looking over his shoulder. Then while I chatted with the Mother and the bride, he went slowly through the album again. We finished talking and as the Mother wrote me the final check, the Dad said:
"These are just great, I mean really great! I've looked through them closely two times and there isn't a single bad shot in the bunch!"
I left without mentioning all the ones I'd tossed during editing. They got about 40% of what I shot and if they think all my shots were perfect, who am I to burst their bubble?
Best,
Andy
AndyKellett wrote:
I left without mentioning all the ones I'd tossed during editing. They got about 40% of what I shot and if they think all my shots were perfect, who am I to burst their bubble?
Batch rename in irfanview with sequential numbering also helps eliminate questions about "why did I get IMG_1546 and IMG_1548 but where's 1547?"
Takes 5 seconds to batch rename (I always prefix mine with a date in the same batch job... e.g., 2009-11-18_####.jpg)
Nothing more for me to add than what previous posters have said:
1. Batch re-name, Burn hi-res images as JPEG in sRGB mode at 240dpi.
2. For "web-friendly" images I burn a separate folder as JPEG, sRGB mode at 80% quality, 1000px x 1000px and 72dpi.
3. Just give away the images that you'd feel comfortable delivering.
They got about 40% of what I shot and if they think all my shots were perfect, who am I to burst their bubble?