photography Archives - Evolve Edits

Editing For IPS: A Guide To Selling Your Work

September 11, 2023September 11, 2023 by alicia simpson

When it comes to selling images to clients, the level of editing can dramatically increase sales, particularly when offering in person previews. The process from capturing an image to delivering an impactful final edit doesn’t end with the click of a camera. It’s during the editing process where the real transformation takes place, turning raw photographs into impactful art pieces your clients will want to hang on their walls. This is a comprehensive guide, straight from the viewpoint of a photography studio, to discover how presenting levels of editing can make your in-person sales session more successful. As a photography business owner, this is what it’s all about, shoot and edit pictures to make more money.

1. Operate with excellence.

Before starting the editing process, it’s paramount to have a dynamic body of work from the wedding day or session. Beyond that you need to have technically sound images to work with as foundation. The editing process relies heavily on high-quality raw files. As the photographer, details matter like lighting, composition, and poses during your photoshoot. The better your raw images are, the more efficient and impactful your post-production editing will be. In addition, you must be thinking about the editing process while shooting. When you have assistants and or lighting equipment in the frame, shoot plate shots with everyone out of the frame to mask in later. A plate shot should be exposed for ambient light with only your subjects left in the image. THIS is by far the difference between amateur and professional artists.

2. Choose the best tools for the job.

Picking the right editing software can make all the difference. Programs like Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop are the benchmark for editing tools and have created a seamless workflow. Of course, there are a lot of newer plugins and Ai software out there to help make things more efficient. Lightroom streamlines organization and batch-editing, while Photoshop is much more advanced and offers more composite and retouching capabilities. If you aren’t an editor, I would highly recommend finding a professional to partner with.

3. Create a complimentary style.

When it comes to creative editing, it’s almost impossible to create consistency. Introducing different toning elements into your images shot in various lighting conditions proves to be very difficult. Crafting a complimentary editing style not only establishes your brand identity, but also makes it easier for clients to identify your work. The goal would be to have clients recognize your work without your logo slapped on it, this is by design for most professional photographers. This will build you up as the trusted advisor, once you establish this level of relationship your clients won’t pushback and experience a level up client experience. Your website, logo, fonts, and messaging should echo your brand as well. Your images and website copy should be cohesive.

4. Present with impact.

In-person sales are most successful when there is impact. Impact which drives emotion from your clients and in turn gets you a better sale. How you present these images to your client as a personalized preview and telling their story needs to hit home for them. Showing different levels of editing shows your clients images at a proof level and what the final product looks like. You must show it to sell it is the approach here. Let them see all useable images and a few you’ve handpicked for marketing so they can have options. Most clients like a slightly warmer edit over cool. Also show good, better, and best levels of editing. All images should be color corrected, 15-30 with more advanced editing to contrast, color shifts, dodge & burn, light skin retouching. The 2-3 perfect moment shots compositing a more impactful sky, removing distractions in the background, retouching the clients more heavily, etc. Make it easy for them to see the transition of a proof to a final product during the slideshow.

5. Create a standard for retouched images.

In the realm of portraits, subtle retouching is very subjective, and you need to standardize what you offer. Once you standardize retouching offered, you can up-sell custom requests for additional revenue. It doesn’t matter what you do, for example refine the skin texture, remove blemishes and flyaway hairs, and enhance the eyes. However, always tread the fine line between enhancement and authenticity. Liquify is one of those aspects of retouching you want to operate with caution. You never want a client to see liquify turned on and off. Once you’ve established a standard, the conversation about getting a quote from your image retoucher and having the client pay the invoice is simple. This is a great up-selling opportunity.

Image © Zach Dalin Photography

6. Rate images during the shoot.

During your shoot, you should be showing your client the back of camera to not only make them feel comfortable and confident, but get their reaction to the images instantly. You are planting the image you intend to sell them in that moment. Rate it in camera so when you get back to your computer you have some pre-selected images already. Now you can seamlessly incorporate these images into your editing selection process. This personalized approach gives them insight into your vision as the artist, making them more inclined to connect with and invest in the final product. They will walk away from the shoot excited to see their images.

7. Slideshow presentation with before & after edits.

When conducting in-person sales, the before-and-after display can be a game-changer. This not only showcases the value your editing prowess brings but also helps clients comprehend the transformation their images have undergone. The stark contrast can serve as a motivating factor, encouraging them to consider more extensive investment options.

Before

After

In-Person Sales and the showcasing of your editing style hinges on the fusion of technically sound images, your vision, and a customer-centric experience. Your editing style and overall branding should magnify emotions, illustrate your attention to detail, and resonate profoundly with your clients. Your website and images should complement one another, pay attention to your client’s preferences, and offer a full-service approach to sales. These things can transform your business into generating more revenue.

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Backup Your Business: How to Build 3-2-1 Backup Plan

August 22, 2023August 30, 2023 by alicia simpson

As a creative business owner, you heavily rely on technology to photograph digital images and preserve your creative work. Whether you’re a professional or an amateur photographer, safeguarding your client’s images is your responsibility. You must create a plan for managing the thousands of files created every year and stick to it, otherwise you lose them and open yourself up to getting sued. The 3-2-1 file backup strategy is a tried-and-true approach that ensures the safety and accessibility of your work long-term. In this article, we’ll dive into how to build a3-2-1 backup plan tailored specifically for a photographer.

What is a 3 - 2 - 1 Backup Strategy ?

The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a simple yet effective method for safeguarding your raw files. It involves creating three copies of your data: one primary copy and two backup copies. These copies are stored on two different media types and kept in two separate physical locations. This approach provides redundancy and protection against various types of data loss, such as hardware failures, accidental deletions, and even disasters like fires or floods.

Now you might be thinking that you are all set because you paid $2k for a RAID system from Qnap or Synology. RAID does not mean that your files are backed up and you don’t need copies. While that can be your primary storage for share ability and performance, that is not a backup plan. In fact, it’s a plan for disaster. Here is how to apply the 3-2-1 Backup Plan for your workflow.

Primary Copy: Organized Storage

Your primary copy storage device is what you work off, the files you access and edit regularly. Get the fastest connection or interface you can afford like
USB-C, Thunderbolt or if using a NAS get 10Gbe. Beyond performance, it’s essential to maintain an organized storage system for these files. Create a folder structure that categorizes your images by year, event type, client name with year, making it easier to locate specific shoots when needed. Regularly clean up this primary storage by removing duplicates and images that no longer hold value. We will cover archiving files later as well.

Local Backup: External Hard Drive

For the first backup, you’ll want to use a different storage device than your primary storage. A cheaper and higher capacity external desktop hard drive is an excellent choice. It does not need to be fancy, just effective. It offers ample storage capacity and remains disconnected from your computer when not in use, protecting your local files. Periodically connect the external hard drive and update the backup to reflect changes in your primary copy. Consider this a local cold storage solution in case files on your primary drive have issues. We will cover automation software so you can backup without having to micromanage this yourself!

Off - Site Backup: Cloud Storage

The second backup takes your data to the cloud, providing an additional layer of protection against physical disasters that could affect your local backups. Cloud storage services like Backblaze, Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3 offer secure and scalable options for storing your photos off-site. Once you deliver files, how are you going to archive them from your primary drive? How long are you storing raw files locally for a delivered event?

Both are good questions, and some photographers sneak this in their contract that they dump the work after so many days to put the responsibility on the customer. Sure, you can store deliver high-resolution JPGs online forever, but why keep the raw files forever? Well, from experience, you might have a client asking for more images of their relative that died a year after the wedding. Or maybe you missed a section when selecting and the client notices it six months later, etc. Storage is cheap and you should 100% store raw files offsite in cold storage where you pay a low monthly fee to store the files there and only pay extra to download. It’s a solid what-if plan and could be massive for your client experience. I would say after you rename, export, and deliver all products, keep the Raw files onsite for 12 months. Then push the Raw + .xmp files to cloud storage, that’s cheap and effective for file management.

Automate the Process

Remember that consistency is key to a successful plan. Set up automatic backups to streamline the process and reduce the chances of human error. Many backup software solutions like Carbon Copy Cloner allow you to schedule backups at specific intervals or trigger them when changes are detected in your primary copy. The same automation can be done for linking your backup storage device to a cloud app to run once a week or in the evenings. Most cloud storage apps require a local hard drive to store the local folders for synchronization. Make it effortless and easily repeatable.

As a business owner, client images are one of the single most valuable but irreplaceable assets. Securing them safety through the 3-2-1 backup plan, involving three copies of your data on two different media types, and stored in two separate physical locations, is a fool proof way to safeguard your creative work. By organizing your primary copy, maintaining a local backup on an external hard drive, and utilizing cloud storage for off-site protection, you can rest assured that your photographic memories are shielded from unexpected disasters and data loss.

Remember, technology evolves, and new tools might emerge to enhance your backup strategy. Embrace the 3-2-1 backup approach, and you’ll be well-prepared to navigate the digital landscape with confidence, knowing that your photographic creations are secure, accessible, and ready to be shared with the world.

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How To Launch a Luxury Product with Evolve

August 21, 2023August 24, 2023 by alicia simpson

When it comes to offering the best products and customer service for your clients you need to step up your game. You should always be thinking how to under promise and over deliver for EVERY client. Creating a luxury experience and offering high end products will bring in more money to your business. Launching a luxury brand or collection can take a lot of time and money to invest. Why not start with introducing new editing options and branding them as luxury products. You can offer large scale wall art as an art piece to fill your clients’ walls now. This takes planning of course but is something you can stand up in less than 2 weeks. First you must figure out what is your goal with this new luxury edit and product. As a business owner, you must create your trusted team of professionals to deliver on this plan. Once you dial in the editing you must execute with excellence for every client. Lastly, you need a marketing plan to get these to your past, current and future clients.

What is your goal with this product?

Your goal should be to make more money but more importantly increase average spend per client. This allows you to get financial predictability in your business. If you book a wedding on October 1st, you should have the sales session by the 15th and cash in the bank by the 30th. It’s not always going to be that way, but this gives you an idea for forecasting financials. You can position this product in multiple ways and know I’m not writing this article to argue selling a la carte vs packages. These are important selling options to dissect and let’s start with a la carte.

The benefit of a la carte is you can charge a premium for everything your client buys. They paid you for the cost of shooting the event, deliverables are always for purchase in addition. Now you can show galleries of other clients that bought products to get your current clients to interested in them. Once they pay the invoice you have orders to place with editors and labs. This is a gamble in my opinion and with less risk there is usually less reward. On the contrary, offering this luxury product exclusively in packages pushes them to spend more. Showing the value of ordering in a package, saving money is key here as opposed to buy a la carte. From my experience, rarely will someone book you for a $250 photo session and buy 1 $2K print. Instead you could sell them a package for $2K including more products with plenty of ceiling to upgrade and scale up prints. Regardless of how you position the product for sales, you must show it to sell it. Again, this comes back to a luxury experience and what says luxury more that seeing fully edited images 2 weeks after a wedding? This is always a digital presentation for IPS, however how are your clients seeing this product in person, on the wall of your studio, website etc.? There are even IPS tools you can build digital collections for their home. You just must entice them to send you pictures ahead of time with discount incentives.

Image by Gronde Photography

Image by Ivan Duran Photography

Find a team to build a custom stylized edit.

As a creative at heart, you will always struggle with finding someone that gets your vision immediately, right? Well, no one is going to read your mind. Learn to communicate clear expectations and find someone you can jump on a call with. In my experience when humans get on the phone more progress is made in the initial stages of dialing in a style. I cannot tell you how many times we get references to other photographers for inspiration, the images sent are completely different in style, little to no art direction, the list goes on. Again, you are the creative director in this process, direct your production team. That said, you need a trusted advisor to help you refine your vision and get it to fruition.

Once you lock in a trusted advisor for this service, your business will benefit immensely.

Images by Salvatore Cincotta Photography

Execute with excellence.

Now the work starts for you to execute with excellence for your clients. You must commit to shooting for the final image for every job and every customer. If you don’t you will not have anything to offer them. Circling back to pre-shot packages you can use this as a leading indicator for how many art prints you need to shoot for. Always shoot for 1 or 2 more than what they order. There is a method to how you shoot/pose these clients directly related to how you want to sell the photos. Start simple with 3 prints in a collection and think large scale. The middle print is a 20×30 minimum and it’s a wide shot of the client in a large landscape, downtown scene or studio shot. Then a close-up of each client for prints to be placed beside the middle image, scale it out if larger families, etc.

Then you can present this to your client with the unedited version and the final edit during the preview. This is where the impact of the edit takes the in-person preview to a more luxury experience. This is why they booked you over an average photographer selling cheaper experiences. You must show large scale images previews on a large TV. Have you thought about what luxury brands offer for a full-service experience? Think about hiring someone to hang it in their home as part of your offerings. This is next level service, and it gives the client peace of mind knowing the work is scheduled to be hung and installed. Again, think beyond what you do now and spend the time executing on it.

Marketing Campaigns.

Now that you have your luxury edit ready to position into sales for upcoming customers, we need to develop a portfolio of work for the website without just dipping into your pockets. As a potential client, I should only be seeing these luxury edits on your website and pushing this newline of products. I recommend getting 3-5 edits done at your own cost and send anniversary emails to all your previous wedding clients. Let’s say you’ve shot 200 weddings in your career if you convert 10% that’s easily enough to cover your new content for the website. Let them know you have expanded your offerings, educate them on what it is and a perfect anniversary gift to themselves. Then you can offer a heavy discount for a limited time to get them interested now. Again, your goal to is to cover costs and get a portfolio of edits generated from this. Launching a luxury brand is not an overnight task, build up to it and why not start by offering luxury edits and products to start making more money now!

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4 Tips To Make Lightroom Run Faster

August 21, 2023August 22, 2023 by alicia simpson

As a full time Lightroom user I am constantly grappling with getting the best performance out of my system so I can edit faster. No matter how much money I throw into a computer, there always seems to be a bottleneck somewhere. Now this article isn’t going to be about how the apple silicon chips are better than intel or how Macs are better than PCs. These tips are universal across all systems however I will always push you to have the most Ram, SSD or flash storage drives and highest speed CPU you can afford to make sure Lightroom run optimally. Hardware aside, here are 4 tips to making Lightroom Classic run faster. Tip #1 Import your raw files with smart previews. Tip #2 AdjustPreferences and Catalog Preview Settings. Tip #3 Save Lightroom catalog to your local drive. Tip #4 Save Ai masking for the end of your workflow

Tip #1 Import your raw files with smart previews.

Lightroom’s performance is heavily reliant on how much energy it takes to generate previews on your raw files. From import to editing inDevelop, Lightroom has to constantly refresh previews for your images. If you are working with raw files on an external drive this can be painful to edit for. I highly recommend importing with smart previews so you can work offline so to speak. When importing you can check this option under File Handling and even make a preset to use again later (ref image1). Once your import and smart previews are done you can disconnect from the external drive and start working with blazing fast speeds (ref image2).

Ref Image 1

Ref Image 2

One could argue that having the images local on a newer flash storage would give you the same performance however I do not recommend ever storing your files locally. This is not a stable workflow, however you can have your raw files safely put away while you work on your editing. Smart previews are like 1/10th the size of the raw files so you can store them locally without filling up your local hard-drive space as well (ref image3). Another benefit is you could have well over 100,000 smart previews storing locally taking up less than 150GB on your drive compared to 3TB of raw files.

Ref Image 3

Tip #2 Adjust Preferences and Catalog Preview Settings.

I always check my Lightroom preferences and catalog settings when things start to slow down (ref image4). Likely an update ran overnight, or something changed in my settings tied to creating a new catalog. First, I like to open preferences and go into the performance tab. Now I have always followed the advice of turning off the GPU feature. Now depending on what system, you have a lot of the newer apple silicon chips have shown to be much faster for Ai masking and exports. From and editing perspective you can’t beat smart previews and properly manage standard previews (ref image5).

Ref Image 4

Ref Image 5

After opening catalog settings, we need to go into the file handling tab to adjust some settings. Standard preview size needs to change to 1024 pixels and quality changed to low (ref image6). The reason why is I want the least amount of energy used to re-generate standard previews after every change I make. Especially if I make global adjustments in Library, I want to see the changes instantly. As another tip I recommend building standard previews before culling and any time you make a global change like applying a preset to all images (ref image7).

Ref Image 6

Ref Image 7

Tip #3 Save Lightroom catalog to your local drive.

This is a simple but very overlooked performance tip. When you create your master catalog where all your work is imported into be sure to save it to your local drive. You want the fastest connection for the catalog and all the previews that are generated. You might be concerned about what if your computer crashes and you lose all your work. That is why you backup your catalog to the cloud after every time you close it (ref image8). It’s another overlooked part of Lightroom, backing up your catalog even though Adobe asks you every time you close the catalog.

Ref Image 8

Tip #4 Save Ai masking for the end of your workflow.

Ai masking in Lightroom is getting better and better with every update. It’s a bit of a slow process to apply and for it to generate custom masks for multiple images. When I edit, I usually focus on the skin tones and then apply Ai masking at the end (ref image9). That way all the heavy lifting is done after I have adjusted image by image in Develop. If you work between multiple computers, you’ll want to save the .lrcat-data file as well since that stores the updated ai settings (ref image10).

Ref Image 9

Ref Image 10

We are all subject to Adobe’s bi-monthly updates and need to be prepared for applying performance driven preferences and workflows. Keep in mind your settings and preference might change with an update, they certainly will with a version upgrade. Take these 4 tips and make your life easier!

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3 Tips to Crop and Straighten faster in Lightroom Classic: Crop it Like It’s Hot

August 21, 2023August 16, 2023 by alicia simpson

When it comes to cropping and straightening there is no automated way to just batch apply. Of course, there is the transform tool but its hit or miss and there are Ai options out there that do it for 1 cent per image, but you have to order additional services. Doing this yourself in Lightroom should be faster than culling with these 3 tips. Tip #1 is to build all your standard and smart previews before starting. Tip # 2 is straightening with the command, click and drag technique. Tip #3 is using different crop grid view for balancing images. Let’s crop it like it’s hot!

Tip #1 Build Lightroom Previews

Lightroom’s performance hangs on the whether it must generate to re-generate image previews. When you are filtered in Library to the images you want to crop and straighten select in the top menu bar Library, Previews and click Build Standard-Sized Previews (ref image1). Now you can strike the R key to get right into crop mode. To advance to the next image you can hold command and strike the right arrow. If your images are running slow check the catalog settings by selecting in the top menu bar Lightroom catalog and clicking catalog settings. In the file handling tab set the Standard preview size to 1024 pixels and Preview quality to low (ref image2).