Event photography workflow
New event photographers may be asking themselves, what is a photography workflow? And why do I need one? In essence, a photography workflow is a photographer’s systematic approach to working with their digital images, from capture to delivery. Having an established workflow for event photographers is important to help you to process and deliver your event photos quickly.
If you’re wondering how to shoot and deliver photos fast, you need to get your event photography workflow right – you can make your workflow smooth and efficient by using Adobe Lightroom. If you’re curious about how to edit photos in Lightroom efficiently, look no further. For quick Lightroom edits, we will also look at batch editing in this post.
In this post, we will assist you with your workflow by looking at using Lightroom to:
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- Import images
- Create collections
- Assign star ratings
- Edit and cull the images
- How to batch edit in Lightroom
- Organise into final folders
- Export images
1. Import images
Import images to Lightroom after attaching your memory card. Copy the photos from your card to your computer, and use the custom text to name the images, for example, ‘CON-2021’. You can add keywords such as the name of the event and the year so you know what the images are.
Then create a folder in the sidebar, and add the images to the folder that you have created so you know exactly where to find the images, and then import the images from your memory card.
2. Create collections
Now that the photos have been imported, it’s time to cull the images. To do this efficiently, you should organise your photos into collections first. You can create collection sets in Lightroom to categorise groups of images.
For example, you can create a collection called ‘Panellists’ for the specific set of images of the panellists of the events to go into. You can do this for any other specific groups of photos you have within your event photos.
3. Assign star ratings
The second step before culling your images is assigning them stars on Lightroom. Give them all a three-star rating, to begin with, as you wouldn’t keep any images worth less than three stars as these get deleted.
As you go through your images, you can upgrade your images to a four or a five-star rating, based on how good they are. Four stars will be the ones that you can share publicly on your website, and five stars will be your favourite photos that you share with the event organisers as the official event photos. Three-star images are the ones that you won’t share but will keep as backup images.
4. Edit and cull the images
As you go through, you can delete images that are not worth keeping. As you start to process the images and rate them, you can begin with editing. This will help you out later on if you start to do the bulk of the work now. You may need to revisit some images for editing, but it will help the workflow efficiency if you edit as you go.
5. How to batch edit in Lightroom
How to edit photos fast? In Lightroom, you can batch edit images by applying the same settings from one photo to others with the same lighting and exposure, which can save on time.
Select the image that you just edited.
Then, Control/Command and click on the images you want to apply these edits to.
Now that you have selected multiple photos, choose Settings>Sync Settings from your menus.
Check that the settings you are syncing are correct so you don’t accidentally crop a photo unnecessarily etc.
Now, these edits will be applied to the photos you selected.
6. Organise into final folders
Once you have culled and edited your images, you can sort the four-star images and five-star images into their respective folders.
Firstly, create your two folders. You can name them ‘Conference 2021 favourites’ and ‘Conference 2021 large set’.
After creating your folders you can sort the images. Click on the ‘Filter’ option, and select ‘rating’ from the menu to filter the images by their star rating. You can then select the ≥4 stars option on the toolbar, by clicking on the fourth star icon. This will display all of your four and five-star images.
To put your four-star images into one folder, first, click on the first four-star image, then scroll down and click on your last four-star image – this should highlight all of them. Then drag the set into your ‘Conference 2021 large set’ folder in the sidebar.
Then click off to unselect. After clicking off, change the filter to five stars by clicking the fifth star icon. Then repeat what you did before; click on the first image and then the last image and drag into your ‘Conference 2021 favourites’ folders in the sidebar.
Now that your photos are grouped into collections, you can go into the folder and rearrange them, if you need the images arranged in a certain order.
7. Export images
To export the images, click on the first and last image in the collection to select them, and then click ‘export’ on the toolbar to export them. You can then create a folder on your desktop to export them to. When you export, you will be presented with a box that says ‘File Naming’.
To ensure that the images are in the correct order, select the ‘Custom Settings’ option from the dropdown menu. You can then type the file name into the box that says ‘Custom text.’ If you name the file ‘CON-2021’, Lightroom will show you what the file name will look like; it should come out ‘CON-2021-001’ for your first image.
You can then resize the images. A size like 1800 x 1200 pixels is a good size for sharing on social media. You can also select the option to ‘sharpen for screens’ which will sharpen the image quality.
You can then click export. Once you have exported, you will be able to see the files in your desktop folder.
We hope you found our event photography workflow tips useful!
If you need an event photographer, consider going with Splento to find a professional photographer with an efficient workflow. At Splento, we provide you with a reliable, on-demand photographer at a reliable rate. Contact us today to see how we can assist you with your event photography needs.
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