A Wedding Photographer's Dream:
How to effectively organize and edit your photos

By Paul Ellis

Shooting digital photography is both a blessing and a curse. For example, following a wedding party from 5am until late in the night can easily leave a trail of photographs numbering in the thousands; even more so when you factor in a second shooter and an assistant. Throw in the ever-demanding goal of trying to capture all the moments, unexpected delights, and emotions of a wedding day and you end up with a lot of hits and misses. The wedding may be over, but your work has just begun. Reviewing all of these images to identify the keepers, toss the rejects, and ultimately make the client happy are not easy tasks. The end of the shoot marks the start of the tedious post-production workflow process.

This “how-to” will help explain how ACD Systems’ new professional product, ACDSee Pro Photo Manager, can facilitate easy organization and editing of your photos after the shoot.  

Let’s continue the wedding shoot scenario. I’d like to show how easy it is to identify your very best shots from among the thousands using ACDSee Pro. The hard part is simply deciding which shots to keep.

All photography featured in the tutorial copyright 2005 Ian de Hoog.

Organizing the Photos

Step 1: Acquiring and backing up your photos

In ACDSee Pro you can acquire and rename your photos with the Get Photos Wizard. Click File > Get Photos to get started. Select your new photos, and Click Create > Create CD or DVD to burn these photos for archival purposes.

Acquire photos from your camera using ACDSee.

 

Step 2: Quickly view your images

Your newly acquired photos are displayed in the ACDSee Pro Browser. The Browser is the main browsing and management area where you can find, move, preview and organize your photos. The handy thumbnail slider quickly increases or decreases the size of the thumbnails. Double-click a thumbnail to open the photo in the Viewer. The Viewer displays your photos in full resolution, one at a time. Press Ctrl-Shift-A to open the Magnifying Glass, which allows you to view a specific detail of your photo, at up to 20x magnification. Press Ctrl-Shift-F to view the photo’s histogram. Press F for an uncluttered, full screen view. Fasten your seatbelt and press the space bar to rapidly see all of the photos in succession.

 

 

 

View your photos in full screen mode, complete with a magnifying glass and histogram to inspect details.

 

Step 3: Tag your photos

As you zoom through your photos, press F again to return your toolbars. Notice the small white checkbox in the bottom-right corner of each photo. This is the visual tagging feature that will help you choose the shots you want to work with further. Simply click the checkbox and it is tagged; for even faster tagging, use the backslash (\) shortcut key.  If you don’t like using the backslash key as the tagging shortcut, don’t worry; you can always select a tagging shortcut key that works best for you. If you’d like to tag your photos in the thumbnail mode instead, press Esc to exit the Viewer mode, and tag your photos by clicking white checkbox in the bottom-right corner of each thumbnail or by selecting the photo and pressing the tagging shortcut key.

 

 

Tagged photos will have an orange checkmark in the bottom-right corner. Use the tagging shortcut key (\) to quickly tag photos.

 

Step 4: Organize your photos

Press Esc to leave the Viewer mode if you haven’t done so already. You will once again see thumbnails of your photos in the Browser. So how do you now easily view your tagged photos? Simply click Ctrl-\ to select all your folder’s tagged photos, and then click Edit > Move To Folder. Click the Create Folder button and create a new folder called “Selects.” A handy way to navigate quickly to your Selects folder is to type in "selects" in the Quick Search bar (located beside the main menu) and press Enter.

 

Move your tagged photos to a new folder.

 

Specify the new folder’s name and location.

 

Now let’s discuss how you can easily make multiple edits to your Selects folder photos. You can adjust the exposure, overlay copyright information, and save them in a new folder as well as make other edits, all at once with the time saving Batch Processor tool.

 

Editing your photos: The Batch Processor Tool

1. From your new Selects folder, click Edit > Select Images (or Ctrl-I) and then click Tools > Batch Processor to open the Batch Processor wizard.

   

   
   

2. On the Batch Image Processing Options page, on the Processing Profile tab, you can select the types of edits that you want to make to your photos. Click on the word for each edit to display the options that are available for that type of edit.

3. In this example, place a checkmark next to Exposure, and click on the word. Use the Curves tool to make tonal adjustments.

   

   
   

4. Next, place a checkmark next to Text Overlay. Type your name in the Text box. Click the button next to the text box to insert a copyright symbol. Make any other font type, color and size adjustments you wish, and use the alignment grid to position the text on your photo.

   

   
   

5. You can see how the editing options will affect a photo in the Preview area. To see how the selected editing options affect the other photos, click the Image List tab and select the photo to display it in the Preview area.

   

   
   

6. When you are satisfied with the photos and the editing options, click Next.

7. On the Output Options page, you control how your edited photos are saved. Select Same as source folder, and check Create a new subfolder for the files. Name it “For Gallery” and click Next.

   

   
   

8. On the Batch Process Completed page, you can browse through your new files and save your editing options as a preset for use in the future.

   

   
   

9. Click Finish.

Now you’ve acquired, backed up and viewed your wedding shots. Plus, you’ve picked the best ones and made multiple edits to them all at once. They look great and you want to share them with the client. ACDSee Pro can help you get them there, but that’s for another article.

More time saving features to explore in ACDSee Pro include fast RAW image previews and non-destructive batch RAW processing.  For more information, or to download a trial or purchase ACDSee Pro, visit www.acdseepro.com.

Paul Ellis is the ACDSee Pro Product Manager at ACD Systems. Paul is an active photographer and enjoys shooting nature and portrait shots.

Pricing and Availability

ACDSee Pro for Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP will be available in January 2006 for $129.99 (USD) at www.acdseepro.com. Special upgrade pricing is available for users of ACDSee 8 and earlier versions. For more information visit www.acdseepro.com.