Working with an Editor
How can I let go of control?
How will someone else “see” MY style?
What if he/she leaves mid-season?
How much does it cost?
How does it even work?
All questions I had before I hired my editor this year. Looking down the barrel of 30 weddings this year I knew I needed some kind of help. If you didn’t already know, I’m a mom of 4 kids with a 14 year age span, 1 dog and 1 cat. 30 is a BIG number for any solo photographer but for me this was a HUGE number. I don’t normally book this many weddings in a year but 6 of them were rescheduled from 2020 so I had no other option but to fit them in.
I knew I wasn’t going to skate by without an editor again this year. It HAD to happen if I was to remain a sane human being by the end of 2021. But, where to even start? Not knowing all the doctor’s appointments that were about to happen, I was lucky I hired when I did. I honestly don’t know what I would have done without her this year.
Between my editor and my amazing virtual assistant, even with 30 weddings, kids, animals, husband, and all the doctor’s appointments and scary news, I actually feel like I have a manageable load. It feels…good!
I figure if you are reading this you are either:
A photographer in the same boat wondering if you might need an editor or
A client wondering what goes on behind the scenes with your photos.
I’ll try to write for both groups here.
The overall of what happens when using an editor is not giving up as much control as you might think. I still have ALL THE CONTROL. Let me repeat: I still have all the control over my images. It’s not like I ship them off and they come back in a galley that I can’t change.
Let me start by saying, I only use my editor for weddings. I still edit all of the portrait sessions (engagement, families, high school senior, maternity) photos myself. So, I’m going to take you through the process for weddings since that is all I use mine for. The process would be the exact same for portrait sessions if you wanted to use an editor for those too. It just didn’t seem cost-effective enough for me since I edit so fast myself anyway.
Another wonderful wedding day at The Barn at Stoneybrooke working with Shawn Fisher Productions on video.
After I shoot a wedding, I take all the memory cards from my cameras and my second photographer’s camera back home and use PhotoMechanic to cull through all the photos. This simply means narrowing down to select the keepers while discarding the blinkers. Every wedding is different, but I usually start with 5-6K image files and am left with an average of about 1,200 photos that will end up in the client’s final gallery. I only upload the keepers to an external hard drive. All the photos (even the blinkers) remain on the original cards that were in the cameras at the wedding. The cards go in my fireproof safe.
I work from the external hard drive to create a Lightroom Catalog of the selected images. Once that is created, I copy all that data (raw keeper files and Lightroom Catalog) to a second external hard drive that also goes in the fireproof safe.
Next, I scroll through the images to both select my favorites for the blog/highlights gallery and also to ensure I’m selecting good “example photos” for my editor. She calls them “anchor images.” So, even if there are not photos from EVERY part of the day in the blog or highlights gallery, I have edited some of every part of the day myself in my style, the way I want them to look. This is typically 400-500 photos that I have edited from scratch myself. This takes me 2-3 days of intense, focused work.
Once I am happy with all of the anchor images, I label them red as “done” so my editor can easily identify which images are completed already and I am able to export the entire Lightroom Catalog with Smart Previews to a shared DropBox folder. She retrieves the catalog there and loads my Catalog into her Lightroom and begins matching my anchor images to the images that are unedited. She can edit the smart previews of the photos but since she isn’t plugged into my external drive where the actual files are, she can’t export the files as finished photos in any way.
Yes, there is a decent amount of knowledge needed to understand how to tweak and “get the look” you are going for but she is well-versed in my editing style/preferences and has looked at so many of my photos that she knows exactly what I want the photos to look like in the end. Plus, she’s a PROFESSIONAL privet editor. She understands Lightroom and editing in and out and up and down. She is trained and fully capable. She literally does this all day long every day.
For the first few weddings we worked together on, she sent me a Preview gallery to check to make sure she was hitting my style exactly the way I wanted things to look before completing the entire wedding. After I had several weddings with zero feedback for her, I gave her the go-ahead to edit away right away. When she is done with the photos in 5-8 business days she exports the entire catalog again back into dropbox for me to retrieve and I load it back into my Lightroom.
ALL DONE. It’s a beautiful thing to see ALL the photos done…just DONE! And, I didn’t have to take so many hours syncing, straightening and cropping each and every photo from the entire day. She sends me an invoice after each wedding to charge me per image for her services (the total number of images in the catalog minus the total number of anchor images). I pay .39 PER IMAGE. So, I typically pay about $300 per wedding for my editor. Totally worth it in my eyes. From what I understand, this is a little on the higher-end but I also wouldn’t trust my clients’ images with less than the best.
I scroll through all the completed photos in Lightroom and every once in a while make a teeny adjustment out of sheer control before declaring it perfect. Seriously, my tweaks are so minor that sometimes as I’m making them I’m asking myself why I’m doing it the whole time.
Now, my editor does not make local adjustments so if there is something like a blemish or something that needs an “extra” edit, this is when I would go in and do that myself. It’s an extra fee so I just choose to do those types of things myself. I typically only do them for the major images that would end up on someones wall or mantle like the family photos, husband and wife and such anyway so It would be difficult to designate which ones I would want my editor to do that for and which ones to leave. In that time, I might as well do it myself.
***This is a good time to note that I never “make people skinnier” or do any major edits that change the way people look in real life other than removing a pimple or something like that. Ever. No exceptions.***
When I am 100% satisfied, still in Lightroom, I sort the photos into collections by parts of the day (Details, The Girls, The Guys, First Look, Bridal Party, Ceremony…etc) and export each section, in turn, into different folders on my external hard drive. After they are all officially on my drive, I start loading the photos into the client’s gallery. That many photos takes almost an entire day to load. When the gallery is finished loading I copy all of the edited photos from the working external drive to the backup external drive and deliver the gallery.
Once I get positive feedback from the clients and everyone is happy and all is good (and only then), do I put the original memory cards back into service for another wedding.
That’s it!
At the end of the day, I am still editing a large chunk of the photos myself and the editor is basically matching my edits side-by-side. Rarely will she ever need to edit a photo from scratch….though I bet she could.
The coolest thing is that she is even faster than I am. I mean, this is her job! She is SO good at it. It blows my mind! This means that my clients get their photos even faster than I could ever possibly deliver them myself and I can book more weddings if I want to. Or, even better, spend more time with my family.
So, what happens if you book all these weddings and then your editor skips town on you? Well, that actually happened to me this year 2 months into my busy season. Yup! But, no one would have ever known because I work with a company that trains and matches the editor to me. So, they already had another editor lined up and trained by the time they told me my first girl had decided to leave. Yes, I had to do the preview photos again to ensure I was happy with her but my business didn’t skip a beat. It was like magic.
So, if I were to give you once piece of advice it would be that I would highly suggest going with a legitimate private editing company (from the country you live in) rather than hiring someone individually that you know or a cheap international company (because those poor people editing your photos probably get paid dirt to do the work). I don’t know how well I would have handled it to find out she was leaving the same week I found out I had a tumor if they hadn’t already had someone lined up. If you follow me regularly, you may remember when Marc and I had our anniversary lunch date week. That was both the week I found out something was wrong and the week I found out my first editor had decided to leave. I may have just had a mental breakdown right there, and then it it wasn’t presented as “already handled”!
Photographers, what's holding you back if you’re not sold yet? Ask me your questions. I’m happy to answer them!
