Shutterfreek on JPEGmini

Today we have a guest post from Paul McPherson (shutterfreek.com), an event photographer based in New Mexico and Colorado.

Camera: I shoot with a Canon 5D Mark III with all L lenses
Computer: I’m on a brand new 27” iMac, processing with a 3.4 GHz i7 / 16GB RAM
Editing: I edit in PhotoShop CC

As an event photographer, I often do two to three weddings a week shooting over 5,000 photos per event.  From those photos, I will select 1000+ images to edit and deliver to our clients.  Using JPEGmini to optimize my photos before editing cuts production time in half selecting, editing, and sharing the images. That being said, I would never sacrifice quality for efficiency. I can safely say even zoomed in at 200% I can not tell a noticeable difference especially that any client, let alone pro photographer, could see in a final large format printed product.  Even at 400% it’s very difficult to differentiate between a normal and JPEGmini optimized image and nearly impossible in a printed product up to 40″.

JPEGmini compression is simply amazing. Revolutionary at that. It’s completely altered my workflow.  My editing work flow is as follows.  I import everything to Lightroom 5 for my bulk storage and master back-up.  I then flag and rate the images I’m going to edit  for the client and run my own custom adjustment presets.  From there I export 300dpi jpeg’s for batch processing in Adobe Bridge CC. From Bridge, I batch process images through custom actions I’ve created in Photoshop CC. After that is done, I do a final tweaking in PS CC, followed by a batch save.  Once I’ve completed all the edits, I optimize the photos once more using JPEGmini, as new adjustment layers in photoshop will again add to the final file size of each image.

In the end, I’m delivering all the edited images + black and white duplicates on 4G USB drives. Usually a full day Wedding will fit on 3 – 4G USB’s, where normally it would’ve taken 7-10 USBS.  Because JPEGmini is decreasing file size so significantly, it is drastically reducing render times when batch running actions with 50+ layers / adjustments within each action.  Now, the only thing I have to do is explain to clients why the size of the images is so small. I would be shocked if this technology doesn’t pioneer its way onboard cameras in the very near future.  It has drastically enhanced our productivity, and created opportunities to spend more time growing the business.  You can see our most recent work at facebook.com/shutterfreekmedia