Tips for streamlining your post-production workflow
If you haven’t heard of the incredible group of humans over at Narrative, then let me introduce them. I like to think of the Narrative team as my post production besties. They make everything that comes after shooting a wedding day or portrait session a breeze. Using their systems for culling images with Narrative Select or creating beautifully laid out blog posts with Narrative Publish, you will see they are truly one of a kind. User friendly, efficient, easy to align with your branding, and more. I use each of their programs in my business and have never looked back and now I am so excited to share them with you!
Instead of trying to explain all of their systems to you myself (aka just fan-girling for a whole blog post), I thought, what better way to share the good news than from the creators themselves!
* Be sure to click the links at the bottom of the page to watch a video of me showing you how I use each program!
Let’s dive in, take it away Narrative Team!
When you get back from a long day shooting, you want to make sure your post-production workflow is as efficient as possible so you aren’t wasting your precious time and energy and so you can deliver your work back to your client as fast as possible. Here some handy tips that will help you streamline your post-production workflow.
1. Have a backup plan
If you have a great backup system already in place this with help you to save a lot of time and stress when you get home from a shoot. We suggest always shooting on 2 cards at once, that way you have an immediate backup. Once you are back on your computer you should back your files up onto an SSD. Backing up and culling images that are on a hard drive can slow down your post-production process significantly. SSDs are about twice as fast as HHDs and that makes them a great option for your first backup and using as your working storage AKA for storing files you are still using or working on. Purchasing an SSD is definitely worth the investment. Then, when you are done you can plug your SSD into your NAS for an extra backup. You can also set your NAS up to automatically upload to your cloud-based storage too. See our ultimate backup guide for more in-depth information on how to set up your backup system.
2. Use a culling software
Culling in Lightroom or not culling at all will slow down your post-production dramatically because having more photos in Lightroom will slow it down and Lightroom will always load photos very slowly because it is designed for editing photos not for speed.
Narrative Select is a lightning-fast photo culling software built for professional photographers that has virtually no load time when scanning between photos. The software also includes a bunch of great features that will make the culling super fast and easy. It uses AI to automatically detect and warn you if a subject’s face is out of focus or if they are blinking and zooming into faces is as easy as tapping the space bar. If you are culling group shots Select has an incredible time-saving feature called the close-ups panel. This shows you close up crops of every face in a photo so you can quickly check every person in an image is looking good - no need to zoom!
The latest feature detects scenes, this means when you import a new project Select uses AI to organize your images into sets of similar images making it easy for you to skip to the next scene once you have chosen the best image. AI-powered Images Assessments will pick out the worst images in each scene for you and apply warnings to those images. That way you can choose to hide all of the images with warning labels on them, meaning Select is basically doing your culling for you. Seeing fewer images = A huge time saver when culling!
Fitting Select into your workflow is super easy as it automatically connects up with Lightroom so when you finish culling your images you simply click the ‘Ship’ and your images will open in Lightroom. You can choose to add it to a catalogue or create a new one and ll of your star and color ratings will be pulled into Lightroom too!
Try it for free and use Emily’s code for 10% off.
3. Cull Backwards
Your winning shots will often be at the end of the scene. Why? At the start of a scene, you may move the couple or subject based on the light, get them to change their pose etc, and you will keep going until you know you got the shot which is generally towards the end! If you’re culling backwards, you will be looking at the winning shots first, meaning you can jump through the rest of the scene super fast.
4. Rate images for your social and blog as you cull
As you are culling make a star or color rating for images you may want to use in your blog or on your social media later. This will make your life much easier in the future when you are looking for images for social and you can quickly jump into a folder and find them. Don’t forget all of the ratings you make in Narrative Select will be pulled over to Lightroom when you ‘ship’ all of your images over.
5. Learn your keyboard shortcuts
This tip might seem super obvious but it is important to include because it will save you a whole lot of time when you are culling and editing images. Having to click around takes us more time than you think and knowing your shortcuts will make your life 10x easier trust us!
6. Blog with Narrative Publish
Blogging with Publish will save you a huge amount of time. Features like the magic wand will mean you can build image heavy posts in five minutes. If you want to get more creative with your layouts then Publish makes it super easy to do that too. Other features help you with SEO features and fast loading so everything is covered. Publish integrates seamlessly into your website and setting it up is super simple.
Try it for free and use Emily’s code for 15% off.
Every second you save counts when you are a photographer, especially during the busy season! We hope that these tips will help you speed up your post-production workflow and make sure you try our products Narrative Select and Publish, they will transform your workflow and save you huge amounts of time.
Narrative Select walkthrough
Narrative Publish walkthrough
