User Q&A: Do You Ever Deliver Images with Multiple Edits?
Last Updated: February 15th, 2020
The question…
So I have a set of solo portraits of the bride and couple’s portraits of the bride & groom that I shot at my last wedding. I’ve got a set of edits that look good across the whole set of those images, but I also have an edit that I like better, but it only works with the feel / lighting of a couple of them, so if I were to deliver them the set wouldn’t feel cohesive.
Do you guys ever deliver multiple edits of the same image (outside of black & white photo edits)? How do you feel about using images on Instagram / Facebook that don’t look the way they got delivered?
Our answer…
Cohesion matters
Let us start by saying this – we’ve totally been there. We’ve been at our editing desk and loved the look of an edit on one photo, but didn’t care for how it worked when we applied it across multiple images.
In our book, a wedding photography service should be aiming to provide images that are consistent to your portfolio. You also want to provide images that are consistent with one another in the context of a single wedding gallery.
Truthfully – it’s this cohesiveness, this “glue”, that let’s us tell a story with photography.
This is also one of the secret ingredients prospective clients look for in wedding photographers when they are more willing to spend more money on your service.
In short: consistent images that are of a high quality are more valuable to everyone.
There is no “one size fits all” here
As with many things in the world of running a photography business, we’d also say that how you brand yourself and what kind of expectations you set with clients (before they book, and after they book) also plays into what decision makes the most sense for you.
For example, we’ve seen some wedding photographers that offer multiple editing styles, and some that even charge extra to edit the photos into 2 separate styles. It seems like overkill to us – but we will imagine that it works for some photographers (and props to them!).
If you haven’t set this sort of expectation at all, or your online portfolio is very consistent in how things are edited, we wouldn’t suggest changing things now. Especially not for a client who decided to work with you with the idea their images would look like what you show in your portfolio.
Social media is an extension of your portfolio
We only post images on our social media accounts that were delivered to our clients. We do not go in and make further adjustments (there just isn’t time for that!).
The only exception is when we put up sneak peaks from a wedding or portrait session.
Normally, sneak peaks go up in 24-48 hours – and very often we end up tweaking the images later on when we are working on the full gallery of edits. This is natural for many photographers. And yes – we’ve even gone back and asked ourselves “what were we thinking?” when reviewing those initial edits, too!
Conclusion
Hopefully we’ve done a good job answering your questions. It’s one of those topics that is rarely talked about on photography websites, but so very valuable to newcomers trying to make the right decisions in how they approach their photo editing work.
