New Viewing Process

Yesterday I alluded to a new process of viewing that I have come up with (no doubt someone is doing the very similar thing but in my world I though of it so 'm claiming it as mine) for viewing images online without having to retouch every single image. There is something to say about only showing you best work, on the other hand, I have a life and would like to spend some quality time with my family. So here it is.

After a session I color correct crop and sharpen in light room and export the images to a SmugMug folder. That in turn is uploaded from within SmugMug and they look like the image below.

This is a 72 dpi image for fast display and uploading. Lightroom has a wonderful Publish Service panel that sends files directly to SmugMug and I do use that but not at this point as LR will not send the files with the watermark. There is a slight chance that I just have not figured out how to also. Anyhow these images can be viewed by clients for selection only. Once they have notified me of which ones they want, I will go ahead and retouch those. At that point I take down the proofs and publish the full size images for purchase and downloading depending on how they are ordering as my SmugMug pricing is higher than my direct to the client pricing.

Following the show your best work logic I provide a few images that I feel are the really nice ones and post them (also downsized) with a gold PF in the lower right corner of the image. This way I let the client know that those are images that the finals will look like. Kind of a teaser. Here is an example.

This seems like a much more practical use of time as retouching fifty plus images is time consuming especially when only ten or fifteen images will be used on average.

Hey that was a little insight into how I am morphing the business into an organized process.


Take care all... Doug