I shot my first Wedding last weekend, and being new to the world of having producing large numbers of photos I was hoping for some advice. I have been doing the vast majority of shot-tweaking in camera raw, but I don't really trust it's ability to sharpen as you have to full to 100% to even get a preview. Does anyone have a preferred bulk-sharpener? I have about 300 shots to get through so opening each one in photoshop isn't really an option!
Are you planning to give them 300 edited photos? That's not usual, as I understand it. I think the usual procedure is to select a contracted number to edit from some kind of proof sheet and only work on those.
You can use Photoshop anyway -- create an action to open, (perhaps resize and) sharpen, and save as a new file, then run a Batch operation on your folder of images using that action.
I'm giving them a lot of shots yeh but I'm not going all out on all of them. I'm converting a lot of the shots in RAW, I'll send them those out, and If they like any in particular that I haven't done a full job on I'll give them another pass.
They're friends of mine so I'm not bothered about putting the extra work in - also the 300 shots includes 3 full days of shooting. They put on a full weekend in the country for their friends so I was covering that and I did a TTD shoot the day before the wedding. All in all around 2000 shots to go through!
I did think about a Photoshop action, I'd prefer adjusting each shot manually though.
Try sorting the photos into groups according to tonal range and amount of detail, then create an action with the "right amount" of sharpening based on a representative image from each group. You can probably get it to 2-4 groups, and get something a bit better than using the same setting for everything.
You can always write stops into your actions to tweak each one as needed but eliminate the get shot, open shot, 15% contrast boost, open curves, ect stuff that every shot is going to get.
