Wedding Lightroom Presets - PhotographyPresets

Lightroom wedding presets

Using Wedding Lightroom Presets can be an amazing way to speed up your wedding photography post production workflow. Wedding presets are also great for sparking creativity and discover new ways of presenting your photos to clients.

If you shoot weddings, you get more raw pictures than you can possibly go through and edit by hand. It is just the nature of the business. An average wedding is likely to end up with thousands upon thousands of images on your memory cards.

Even after you cull through the images and choose the best ones to edit, you may have hundreds or upwards of a thousand keepers. If you are going to get through all of them in a reasonable amount of time, you are going to need a good, efficient workflow.

Since half of the battle in wedding photography is meeting deadlines for your clients, Lightroom wedding presets can drastically speed up your workflow.

How to use Wedding Lightroom Presets for an efficient Lightroom workflow

Lightroom is amazing. It has all the tools you need to get a good efficient workflow going, so you can get through your pictures quickly and keep your customers happy. After all, Lightroom is built around efficiency.

Wedding Lightroom presets take the built-in, efficiency boosting tools that Lightroom has to offer, to the next level. Presets are an integral part of a great post production workflow for weddings. Wedding presets can help you deliver your images to your clients faster than you ever thought possible.

Everyone has their own workflow that they enjoy. However, not all workflows are efficient. It is up to you to find the best workflow for your needs. We find that using Lightroom’s built in tools along with a good wedding preset pack is the best way to edit large numbers of wedding photos.

The following is one way you can approach a post production workflow for efficient wedding photo edits. These tips can save you a tremendous amount of time on your edits:

Step 1: Sort your Wedding Photos

First, start by sorting your photos by categories. Some ideas to get you started may include:

Use whatever categories work for you and your photography style, but get them sorted. That way you can just work on one category at a time if you only have a little bit of time and you can make sure that each category has a consistent look.

You will also be able to achieve a consistent look in each category by using our Lightroom presets for weddings.

Step 2: Rating and selecting your best wedding images

Don’t overthink this step. It’s really easy.

As you scroll through each picture, give it a rating of 1 to 5. You can do this on your keyboard for faster results if you don’t want to spend forever clicking the stars under each picture with your mouse. To do this, simply press numbers 1-5 to rate the image accordingly.

Don’t delete pictures at this point either. You never know when you want to use a picture, so I would recommend against deleting any photos, unless they are completely unusable.

Assigning star ratings to your wedding images:

5 Star Rating: 5s are pictures that they are definitely going to want to buy in canvas and put over their mantle.
1 Star Ratings: 1s are pictures that you are definitely not going to show them, ever.
2-4 Star Ratings: The rest is a sliding scale in between.

Don’t overthink this step, just give the pictures from your wedding shoot whatever numbers come to you first. You are the artist and your intuition about your work is excellent, so trust it. It is also normal for ratings to change as you take a second look and you change your mind.

After you have rated your pictures, you basically want to decide how many pictures from each category you want to keep and filter your photos by rating accordingly. If you got tons of pictures at the reception, you might want to filter them by 4 and up, but if the venue was difficult and you ended up with a lot of 2s and 1s, you might want to filter by 3 stars and up.

Just make sure you still have pictures from the most important wedding moments – cutting the cake, throwing the bouquet, etc.

Step 3: Auto Tone your images

Many wedding photographers scorn the Auto Tone button.

They’re not wrong. But they’re also not completely right. Auto Tone is a poor excuse for editing, and if it’s all you’re doing, you’re wasting your money on your Adobe subscription.

Also, if you have an image that you purposely overexposed or underexposed, Autotone is going to totally mess that up for you. That half-silhouette portrait of the bride looking out the window from the darkened room? Yeah, you didn’t really need Auto Tone to lighten the entire exposure to bring out the detail in the windowsill.

But Auto Tone isn’t all bad for wedding photography. It’s actually a really good place to start from. If you were taking golden hour pictures rapidly as the light changed and some ended up underexposed, Auto Tone will come to the rescue.

It’s a great baseline to use for bringing out your RAW images, which come out of your camera looking kind of muddy and dark. For nearly every image that was meant to have a standard exposure (in other words, you weren’t deliberately underexposing or overexposing), Auto Tone will help make your pictures easier to work with and easier to see what you need to do on them. Auto Tone also gets them properly exposed so you can put a preset on and get the effect you want.

Step 4: Auto sync your wedding images

A great way to speed up your Lightroom workflow is to sync batches of images for basic edits. The way you might use the sync or auto sync function in the Lightroom develop module is to sync a group of similar wedding shots the have similar lighting conditions.

For example, say you have about 100 photos of the reception of a recent wedding that you would like to edit. Since they were all outside and have similar lighting conditions, you can highlight all the photos in that session and turn on auto sync. Then it will automatically apply your edits to all chosen images, when you move the sliders to make basic edits in Lightroom (like saturation and vibrance, exposures, contrast, ect.).

The auto sync may not be perfect, and you may have to edit individual photos further, as you see fit. However, you will have saved a lot of time doing this.

Step 5: Choose and apply your wedding presets!

You’re almost done!

After normalizing your photos and adding basic edits, the next step is to go through your shots and apply various wedding Lightroom Presets to enhance your photos. This will allow you to apply several different creative looks and styles to your photos at very fast speeds.

You can also choose a preset for each category to give each group of photos a unified look. Apply it and watch the magic appear! With our best Lightroom presets for weddings, you can choose whatever effect or artistic look you want for your pictures, apply it, and end up with a gorgeous look that only took you a few seconds of time!

When you combine wedding presets with built-in Lightroom functionalities like the sync / auto sync, you will be editing your wedding photos faster than you ever thought possible. With the best wedding presets, you to have a super efficient workflow without sacrificing quality of your wedding photography.

Send your client your proofs.

No, you’re not quite done editing. But you don’t need to be, to send your proofs.

What you’re doing here is giving your client baseline-edited proofs to select from. When they choose which ones they want to order as prints, that’s when you will do local adjustments, soften the skin, and basically make it perfect for printing.

It’s not worth your time to meticulously edit thousands of pictures like that, but once your client is paying for a print of the picture, it does become well worth your time to do those more time-consuming edits.

What are Lightroom presets for weddings?

Wedding Lightroom Presets are presets that are specifically designed for editing wedding photos. Presets are just pre-adjusted settings that you can apply to your images in Lightroom to save yourself a ton of time editing.

Instead of having to spend several minutes on each image, moving your sliders, adjusting your colors, and getting each picture to look the way it does in your artistic vision, you can edit it with one click of a button and get beautiful, magical looks.

For many photographers, presets are all they really want to do to edit their pictures. And that is great! With our Lightroom presents for wedding photographers, you will get a gorgeous look that your clients will be delighted with.

If you want to continue fiddling with the picture on your own, you can do that too. Some people like to use presets as a starting point for a look they like, and then continue working to get the perfect look for the occasion. Whatever your editing style is, our Lightroom presets for wedding photography will simplify your workflow and help you get the beautiful looks you need for your wedding photos.