As a wedding photographer it may be unexpected to face the realisation that you will probably spend more time in front of a computer processing your images ? than you do behind the camera taking pictures. This is true for the vast majority in this profession and only those who are super busy generally leave the processing to someone else back in the studio. It of course makes sense to process your own images and maintain artistic license right through the delivery process.

To remain productive back in the labwe need good machines and software. Thankfully, computers and software have come a long way in recent years and the digital workflow can work wonders. However, with camera resolution increasing, and professional photographers shooting pictures in RAW mode (raw data) the files sizes, quantity and processing required from a typical wedding can be a taxing process for most computers.

The two most important factors in selecting your computer of choice is CPU and RAM ? the graphics card surprisingly contributes very little in terms of speed. You will need at least 4GB of ram although 8GB+ has real benefits if working on lots of files and multitasking with various software tools. More than 8GB is probably overkill at this time even with 21MP files from the likes of the popular Canon EOS 5DMK2. For CPU choice, do go with a quad-core configuration ? these are noticeably much faster with image editing work and the software you will be using makes full use of multi core threading. Quad-core is becoming a standard for MACs and PCs so it makes sense on a cost-performance level anyway. To put into perspective ? on a 3Ghz quad-core PC editing images from a 5DMK2, it still takes around 3secs to flick between one picture and the next for processing ? multiply that by say 700 images from a typical wedding and you can see why a fast configuration is important for photography work.

It goes without saying that you need a good storage solution too, but luckily big fast hard drives are relatively cheap. Invest in an additional external hard drive for achieve purposes or invest in a recordable Blu-ray drive if you want to store original RAW files on achieve media.

Most wedding photographers capture and edit in the RAW camera file format and convert to JPEG at the final print/client stage. Always keep the RAW images until you know the client is fully satisfied.

Making the right choice in software is also critical. You really do not want to be learning new tools continuously. Thankfully, an industry standard piece of software has emerged in recent years for both MAC and PC: Adobe Lightroom has it?s flaws, but remains a fantastic weapon for the wedding photographer dealing with large numbers of images. Check it out with the free trial available. If you?re looking to engage in more detailed and flexible image alterations, Photoshop is probably your only other choice to make, and both programs integrate very well.

If you are really concerned about image quality you might also like to invest in some image noise reduction software to clean up low-light photography grain. Quite a few choices are available for image noise reduction but the two best solutions today are Imagenomic?s Noiseware 2 and Neat Image. The downside to using such software is that this will increase the effort required to complete your project.

So you?ve got everything together ? how much time is it going to take to process a typical wedding shoot? A rule of thumb that is sensible states for every hour of photography ? you will spend around 3+ more hours in post production. Clients rarely equate photographer fees with the work also required after the big day, but clearly it is something you need to think about wisely to make your time spent worthwhile.

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