The digital darkroom – Dylan Todd Photography’s digital workflow

A lot of people thing photography is just a few clicks of a button. I can tell you, this is far from the truth. Here’s everything you need to know about what Dylan Todd Photography does after they’ve taken the shot – in the digital darkroom.

1. Loading to the computer

            Once we get back to our studio, we start the process of uploading your photos to hard drives and backing them up in a cloud system via Adobe Lightroom. This is done to help make sure that the images we’ve captures are safe and secure.

2) Sorting the photos

            We can’t just have all of the hundreds of thousands of photos in one folder. No, we like to keep it a bit more organized. We use an annual hard drive, so for this year, 2022, we have a hard drive that we’re working off of. This is organized by ‘Type of Shoot’ whether it’s a portrait, wedding, listing. From there, we organize by the shoot date and the subject. For people it’s their name(s) for listings – the address and client. We’re not done yet. Images that are of longer weddings are then photographed by the phase of the wedding – such as ‘Getting Ready’ ‘Ceremony’ ‘Formal Photos’ and ‘Reception.’

3) Processing the photos

            Processing photos is mostly done in Adobe Lightroom. This program allows for the organization of photos and editing (without damaging the original files). It’s a powerful tool and 80% of what we do, regardless of the service we are providing, is done in Lightroom. The other 20% is edited in Photoshop. Though Lightroom is powerful, hand retouching images to remove distractions in the background seamlessly or diminishing pores in a headshot is best done in Photoshop. We have over 10 years’ experience in Photoshop and if you have a request, we should be able to do it.

4) Exporting

            Exporting is taking the photo and making it more manageable. When we photograph we do so in a RAW file format. This file format has a lot more information in it and a normal Jpeg we know and love and that’s how we’re able to edit it as much as we do. We deliver Jpeg/Jpg files (there’re the same) – which are flattened. More of a ‘what you see is what you get’ file format that is able to be shared, viewed, and printed more easily. Sometimes people ask if they can have the RAW files and we do not offer them because it 1) isn’t exemplary of the final product and work that we do to perfect your images and 2) because most people wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had it. We want to make sure that you have beautiful images that you can share effortlessly.

5) Archiving

            Like I said before, I have a working hard drive for the year, about 4 terabytes of space, this works for me and by the end of the year it’s plenty full. At that time, I’ll do another backup of the hard drive to cloud storage and make a second copy of the physical hard drive. The now two hard drives are stored in different locations (should fire or rain effect one). We don’t want to keep all our eggs in one basket with your memories.