If you were anything like me after my own wedding, you were sitting on pins and needles waiting for your photographer to deliver your wedding images? Wouldn’t it be great to have a sneak peek right after the wedding to tide you over? What if the photographer could actually deliver the preview right at the wedding reception? It’s totally possible and with a little planning, it’s not as hard as you might think. It’s called a Same Day Edit.

I’ll be the first to say I don’t do this at every wedding, but if there is time, or the clients have specifically asked for it, I always try and share about 40-50 images from the day itself at the reception. In advance, I coordinate with the planner and the DJ when it might be an appropriate time to share the show, in fact, a few venues I work at regularly expect it now. After the cutting of the cake while everyone is still on the dance floor, I present the slideshow on the venue’s ceiling mounted projector and screen while the DJ plays a few songs. If they don’t have a screen or projector I will bring a 30″ Apple Cinema Display and set it somewhere out of the way for guests to enjoy.

My workflow:

As I mentioned it takes a little planning, so throughout the day my staff and I “lock” our favorite images on our Nikon DSLR cameras to flag just the files we think might look good in the slideshow. This also works on Canon cameras i’m just not sure of the exact process. Once everyone is settled in at dinner, I sneak into a back / side room and download only those locked RAW images into Photo Mechanic on a 15″ MacBook Pro. I then ingest those locked images and do a fast cull to get down to 40-50 images from within Photo Mechanic. I then export those images into a folder on the desktop and launch Lightroom. I create a new Lightroom catalog and import and apply my standard RKP style settings. I do a quick and dirty edit, crop and export the images as full size JPG to a folder on the desktop. I then launch Photos (previously iPhoto) on the Mac, import the edited JPG’s and create a new slideshow. I quickly preview the slideshow and rearrange any slides to make a perfect story sequence. This entire process takes about 20 minutes +/-. I then head back out to the reception and meet up with the planner or DJ to connect my laptop. I should mention I bring three different dongles for both VGA, DVI and HDMI cables to accommodate whatever they have available on the projector. If possible I try and get to the venue before the wedding and calibrate the monitor using a X-Rite i1Display Pro. This allows me to save the color profile and figure out what screen resolution I need to set my projector at ahead of time. There’s nothing like a computer / projector misconfiguration to hose this process up, trust me, it happens.

Here’s the quick breakdown of my workflow:

1. All photographers lock images throughout the day on DSLR’s that might be used for the slideshow (3-5 cameras)
2. During dinner, ingest only locked images in Photo Mechanic
3. Cull 40-50 images in Photo Mechanic and export to a folder on the desktop
4. Create new catalog in Lightroom and ingest locked files, render 1:1 and standard size images
5. Apply typical RKP style settings to photos, crop and edit images quickly
6. Export final edits to JPG in a folder on the desktop
7. Launch Photos (previously iPhoto) and import edited JPG’s
8. Quickly preview the slideshow in Photos and prepare for presentation (4 second on screen time with fade transitions)

At a recent destination wedding in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I had the pleasure to work with the amazingly talented wedding videographer Jenny Roberts of Heartistree Studios. It’s been a few years, but I met Jenny when photographing her sister Elizabeth’s wedding at Historic London Town and Gardens in Annapolis. Jenny put together this video highlighting a same day edit I did at Emily + Tony’s wedding at Salero on the Beach.

Feel free to ask any questions and enjoy the feature video!

Same-Day Wedding Slideshow-Rob Korb Photography from Heartistree Studios

Venue – Salero on the Beach

Color Correction Device – X-Rite i1Display Pro

Be sure to also watch Emily + Tony’s wedding video at https://vimeo.com/141242258

Lastly, here’s what the same day edit looked like in person…