4 Photographers Share their Editing Work Spaces

Wedding photographers may take photos, but they actually spend most of their time at their desk! 4 professional photographers share where they spend most of their time and their current photography workstation and desk set up.

Wedding Photographers Office Desk Spaces

4 wedding photographers share their home office and desk set ups giving us an insight into he hardware and software they use when back in the office editing.

I have always used Macs, ever since I was a kid. My mum was a journalist and we had one at home from a young age. I currently edit on a 27inch iMac which is about 3 years old but still doing just fine. I have a laptop which I use when I’m working abroad too.

When I’m working at the desk I edit using a behringer midi board which is usually used for music production – it gives you fast control over lots of different aspects of the editing software. Thanks to covid I’m currently sharing my office with my wife,which is actually really nice! But it does mean I’m a bit more squished into my desk than usual! In fact I almost can’t bear to show you as it’s such a mess haha. Just don’t look too closely.

Software –  I use PhotoMechanic when I get back from a shoot, for offloading memory cards and keeping all my files in the right place. I edit with Lightroom, using custom presets and profiles. And if I have any major retouching then I do that in Photoshop.

I also use Carbon Copy Cloner for my backup software. My past working in TV has made me hyper conscious about data storage and redundancy so I’m very careful about backups and making sure I have copies of everything in multiple places.

Back up Hardware – I have a working hard drive which is a fast Lacie drive with a thunderbolt connection. That’s for imports and exports to Lightroom of whatever I’m currently working on and means I don’t have to hang around for too long when waiting for Lightroom to export a wedding. I then archive to separate external hard drives and have a rotating system for storing one of them off site at all times. I also have various small SSD drives as further backups of different projects.

Client Galleries – Once I’ve edited a wedding it’s all uploaded and saved online. I use Shootproof for my gallery system and I offer all my couples completely free, full-res downloads from their gallery. It’s amazing how much it’s changed over the last 5-10 years, moving from DVDs to USBs and now to digital delivery. What’s lovely about it is that each time it’s just gotten easier and simpler for couples to share their photos which is great.

I’m Chris, a Birmingham based wedding photographer and this is my workspace (complete with 80’s action figures). It’s a standing desk I made myself from old kitchen counter worktop and pinion legs! Its great!

I`ve my got my space set up so it’s really easy to jump on Zoom calls with people, and I use a Logitech Webcam, Ring light, and Blue Snowball mic all set up and the results are amazing. I use PC platform (Custom built Chillblast), and have subscriptions to Adobe, Dropbox and Microsoft products which transfer over to my Dell laptop so I can edit when I’m on the run.

Software – For editing I use Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop, but also use Topaz labs for noise reduction, and have recently invested in Luminar 4 as well. All fantastic products. I also use a Wacom graphics tablet instead of a mouse, and a Loupedeck to assist my edits in Lightroom.

For image management I use Photo Mechanic, Jpegmini & BackBlaze for culling, key wording, compressing and cloud storage.

Client Galleries – For my clients I love the Shootproof galleries, these are fantastic and I also use the contracts & contacts feature of Shootproof to help manage my clients from booking to completion.

My website was custom designed using a Flotheme, and I manage the back end via wordpress, so it’s easy to upload new blogs and tweak my website.

Hi, I’m Albert a wedding photographer in Bristol and this is my home office setup. I currently use a 27” iMac 2017.

It’s specced up with a 4.2 Ghz i7 processor and 40GB RAM. A 1TB SSD and a Radeon Pro 580 8GB graphics card.

I also have a 12” MacBook. 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and a Intel HD Graphics 615. They don’t make these anymore but I wanted the smallest lightest laptop possible for travel. Even with these maximum specs editing isn’t a great experience. But my priority was small and light. Something suited for travel and it’s more than capable of backing up and culling on.

I use a terrible Samsung SyncMaster display as a second monitor. I’ve owned it since 2012 but it does the job of playing Netflix/YouTube on.

Software – I use Lightroom LrC for editing and have done now for over 10 years. I can’t deny it’s slow at times and has the odd bug but 99% of the time it works flawlessly.

I used to use Pfixer to edit with using keyboard shortcuts. It massively sped up my workflow. However, I recently bought a TourBox and I’m in the early stages of testing it out. I don’t think it is any faster than keyboard shortcuts but it’s a little more ergonomically friendly and fun to use. Essentially it gives the user buttons, wheels and dials that you can configure to Lightroom settings. Because it fits in the palm of your left hand it leaves your right hand free to use the mouse and keyboard. So far I really enjoy using it and the bonus is that it takes up very little desk space.

I use Photomechanic for culling. Lightroom does this very well but for the volume of images I shoot Photomechanic is hands down the fastest for my workflow.

I use Things as my daily ‘to do’ planner. I would be lost without this software. I rely on it every single day to complete office tasks and admin.

I use Light Blue software for my business management. It sends out forms and contracts to couples making sure I never double book a date. It tracks enquiries and bookings, produces invoices and also helps with my finances and taxes.

I use JpegMini for reducing the size of images before uploading them to the cloud. For the small price it is a time saver.

Toggl is a free bit of software for tracking time. I started using it last year to track how long I spend editing. It’s really useful to know how long an edit takes and lets me know how productive I’m being.

Back up hardware – I store all of my images on a Drobo 5D. It’s a proprietary RAID system but the beauty is that you can put in all your old hard drives to make one large volume. I have 34TB of space in my main Drobo. I wanted a RAID so that if one hard drive dies my data is still secure. My main Drobo is backed up to a second Drobo 5D. Complete overkill but should my main drobo die I will be covered. There is a third copy of my RAW images 30 minutes away from my house which I back up every few weeks. I don’t expect to ever need these but it’s peace of mind. I have a third Drobo 5D that I store all my old RAW files on as well as edited jpegs.

I use an 8TB Seagate hard drive for Time Machine which makes daily incremental backups of my iMac. I can’t remember the last time I needed this but you can never be too careful!

Client Galleries – I recently moved to Pic-Time. I’m new to it but very impressed with the functionality. Before this I used to use Shootproof and also Zenfolio.

Last but not least is my sound system! The computer has a Bose Companion 5 which is more than enough decibels for Spotify. Lastly I have a 7.1 home cinema sound system hooked up (which I haven’t used since we had a baby!)

I run my whole business from my 15” MacBook Pro. I fell in to the Apple ecosystem when I bought my first iPhone about 10 years ago and I must admit, I think It would be hard for me to come away from it now. I just love how it all links together.

My phone and iPad are also important parts of my working life when I’m not at my desk. I do have a larger external monitor that I sometimes mirror my screen to however, I often edit straight off the MacBook screen.

Software – All my weddings get culled in Photo Mechanic and then edited in Lightroom. I do a few tweaks on the odd picture in Photoshop but Lightroom handles the bulk of my editing. I run my exported Jpegs through Exposure 4 for an extra kick before shrinking the file size with Jpeg Mini. Whilst in Lightroom, I use Pfixer to help speed up my editing.

I create a slideshow for every wedding and do these in iMovie. I use FCPX for any promotional videos that I need to create. I also do some audio editing/creation in Logic Pro.

I use Blog Curator to help me visualise any wedding blogs before uploading the images to WordPress and I use Album Stomp to design my any wedding albums.

Back up hardware – My back ups start with the SD cards I shoot on. They never get deleted until the wedding is delivered. I back up every wedding on to portable HD’s as soon as I arrive home so that within an hour of returning and then I have the RAWS in 4 separate places. I have on-site and off site HD’s that are mirrored for extra security.

Once I cull a wedding, I move the culled files to my working machine (which has cloud backup running) and edit the wedding. The JPEGS are then uploaded to Pic-time and also on to another HD for storage.

Client Galleries – I use Pic-Time for gallery delivery. I love the modern feel to it and the inbuilt store and automation is fantastic. It’s very easy to set up and just leave it to do its thing. 
I host my slideshows on Vimeo, but embed them to a password protected page on my website.

My office is decorated with lots of posters/pictures of my favourite bands, quotes and movies. I also have some pictures of my kids on the walls along with some light up signs. As we spend so much time in front of the computer, I think it’s very important to have a space that feels like home and cosy to be in. I also have smart bulbs in the room that I set to daylight WB when editing so that whatever time of day I edit, the light is consistent.