Wedding photo editing takes longer than most photographers will confess when they are just starting, and longer than most clients think when they are waiting for their gallery. The honest answer is 15 to 20 hours of focused editing work each wedding, and that number increases quickly during peak season when numerous weddings overlap. This is where your time is going and what it is really costing your business.
Industry Average Editing Times
A typical wedding photographer will take between 1,500 and 3,000 photographs at each wedding. Not all of them make it to delivery, but they all need to be examined, and many of them need color correction, retouching and final processing before the gallery is ready. Most photographers often underestimate how long each stage takes until they start tracking their real hours.
Culling 3,000 Images: 2 to 4 Hours
Culling is the process of going through every raw file from the shoot and choosing the best photos for editing and deleting duplicates, technically incorrect frames, and redundant shots. If you are good at it you can cull about 10-15 photographs every minute, thus just sifting 3,000 images takes 2-4 hours before you have even made a single adjustment.
For the conservative shooter, this phase is faster. For photographers who shoot at a high volume to make sure they cover every moment, culling becomes one of the most time-consuming portions of the entire production.
Color Correction: 3 to 5 Hours
After the strongest photographs are selected, each frame will need to be color corrected for white balance, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation and tone. Even with a good Lightroom preset to start with, each photo will need specific tweaks to accommodate varying light conditions as the day goes on.
A wedding includes several surroundings, outdoor ceremony light, shaded portraits, and celebration venues with mixed artificial lighting, and each change in lighting needs to be corrected manually to ensure that the whole gallery is consistent. Color Correction on a complete wedding gallery requires 3 to 5 hours of concentrated labor at a realistic speed of 200 to 300 photographs an hour.
Retouching: 5 to 10 Hours
In retouching, the editing time grows considerably. Basic retouching (skin smoothing, blemish removal and some minor background repairs on key portrait pictures) adds a few hours to the workflow. If the customer wants more detailed work, such as figure contouring, wardrobe corrections, background clean-up, or sophisticated skin retouching on a broader number of photographs, that range goes up to 10 hours or more.
Even the photographers who restrict retouching to the most significant frames, usually bridal portraits, couple photographs and family group shots, will spend at least 5 hours on this part of a comprehensive wedding gallery.
Exporting and Delivery: 1 Hour
Even with fast hardware, a full wedding gallery at the right quality takes time to export, file format and color profile. Preparing the final file structure and getting the delivery ready before sending the gallery to the client adds another hour to the total. This includes uploading to a client gallery platform.
Total: 15 to 20 Hours Per Wedding
A reasonable figure for the total ‘ add all the stages together ‘ is 15-20 hours of editing labor per wedding under typical circumstances. Photographers who do greater levels of retouching, manage enormous volumes of images, or work on complicated galleries with different locations and lighting situations can spend over 20 hours in total.
That’s 30-60 hours of editing work per week, on top of shooting, client communication, and running the business, during the height of wedding season, when you may have two or three weddings per weekend.
What That Time Costs You
That’s 160 hours a month spent behind a screen instead of behind a camera, at 20 hours of editing per wedding and an average of 8 weddings per month during peak season. That’s 4 whole weeks of work you’re not doing on shooting, marketing, client relationships, or building your firm.
There’s the opportunity cost, and then there’s the delivery pressure. Clients want their galleries within 2-4 weeks after the wedding. Having backlogs of edits spanning many shoots is really stressful when trying to achieve those expectations, and it can really hurt the relationships with your clients that you have worked so hard to develop.
Every hour spent editing is an hour not spent on the work that genuinely builds your business, the job that only you can perform.
Save Time by Outsourcing Your Wedding Editing
Photodotedit offers expert wedding photo editing services such as culling, color correction and retouching with a 24 to 48 hour turnaround. Our editors work to your particular style, your Lightroom settings and create consistent, polished galleries so you can focus on shooting and expanding your business. Culling is $0.03 each image Color correction is $0.10 per image
Get 15-20 hours back from every wedding you capture. Try your first edit for free today.
