How We Cull and Edit a Full Gallery

An editing workstation with a calibrated monitor showing a photo being color-corrected — The day is captured in eight hours. It's finished over the following weeks, here.

People are sometimes surprised that a gallery takes weeks. Here’s the actual process between your last dance and the “your photos are ready” email.

1. Back up before anything else

Cards are offloaded the same night to two separate drives, and a third copy goes to cloud or an off-site drive within a day. Nothing is deleted from a card until there are three copies in two locations. This is non-negotiable and it’s why we shoot to two cards in-camera on the day as well.

2. Cull in passes

A wedding might be 4,000–6,000 frames. We cull in rounds: a fast pass to reject the obvious — blinks, misfires, test frames, near-identical bursts — then a slower pass to pick the strongest frame from each real moment. The goal is the complete story with nothing important missing and nothing redundant kept. A full wedding gallery typically lands around 600–900 images.

A grid of similar photo thumbnails with some marked as picks — Round two: from each burst, the one frame where the expression and timing land.

3. Color and tone

Every selected frame gets exposure, white balance and tone adjusted so the gallery is consistent room to room — the getting-ready window light, the dim ceremony, the string-lit reception all reading as one coherent set in our style. This is the bulk of the work.

4. Retouching

Standard retouching is light and natural: distracting background elements, temporary blemishes, a stray hair, an exit sign glow. Deeper retouching — a heavier skin edit, object removal, head swaps in a family group — is done on request or on the album images. We don’t reshape bodies as a default.

5. Review and delivery

A second set of eyes goes through the finished gallery to catch a missed blink, an inconsistent frame, a duplicate. Then it’s uploaded to your private online gallery with downloads and print ordering, and you get the link. Weddings run 4–8 weeks depending on season; smaller events are faster.

Frequently asked questions

Can we get the RAW files or the rejected frames?

We deliver the finished, edited gallery — that’s the product, and it represents our work properly. RAWs and rejects (blinks, test frames, duplicates) aren’t provided. See our post on file formats for why.

Why not just deliver everything and let us choose?

Because 5,000 unculled frames — including every blink and misfire — isn’t a gift, it’s a chore, and it isn’t representative. Culling and editing is the craft you hired.

Can we rush the turnaround?

Often, for a fee, depending on the queue. A sneak-peek set of 30–50 images within a week is standard regardless.

Curious how your day would come together? Ask us — we’re happy to show full galleries and explain our turnaround.