Editing Wedding Galleries in Lightroom: My Actual Workflow, Start to Finish
I get asked constantly how long a full wedding gallery takes me to edit, and the honest answer varies wildly depending on how disciplined I am about the workflow I'm about to describe versus how often I let myself get distracted tweaking individual images out of order, which is a mistake I still make more often than I'd like to admit.
The culling pass, before touching a single slider
I start with a full culling pass before touching a single edit slider, going through every image in the gallery, often 3,000 to 4,000 raw files from a full wedding day, using only the flag and reject shortcuts, no star ratings yet, just a binary keep-or-discard decision made fast, usually under two seconds per image. This first pass typically cuts the gallery down by 40 to 50 percent, removing blinks, duplicates, and technically failed frames.
Star ratings, judged on moment rather than technical quality
The second pass, on survivors of the first cull, is where I apply star ratings from one to five, judging composition and moment rather than technical quality, since I've already filtered out the technically broken frames. Five-star images are the ones going into the final delivered gallery as hero shots; three and four stars fill out the broader gallery; anything landing at one or two stars during this pass usually gets cut entirely in a final trim.
Editing in batches by light, not chronology
I edit in batches by lighting condition rather than chronologically through the day, which was a genuine workflow change from my early years that saved real time. Every image shot in the same location under the same light gets grouped and edited together, since a base exposure and white balance adjustment made on one image in that batch usually transfers cleanly to the rest via copy-paste settings or sync.
My actual edit order within a batch
White balance and exposure first, since these are the foundational corrections everything else builds on. Then contrast and tone curve adjustments for the overall mood I'm going for, I tend toward slightly lifted shadows and protected highlights as a starting point for most wedding work. Color grading comes next, usually subtle adjustments to warm skin tones slightly without pushing the whole image orange. Local adjustments, dodging and burning specific areas, brightening a face that fell slightly into shadow, happen last, after the global adjustments are locked in.
Presets as a starting point, never a final answer
I built my own preset based on my most common edit choices years ago, and I apply it as the first step on a new batch, but I've never delivered a gallery where I didn't manually adjust every single image afterward at minimum for exposure and white balance, since lighting conditions vary enough shot to shot that a preset applied blindly produces visibly inconsistent results.
Export settings that account for how images are actually viewed
I export at full resolution for print-quality files but also generate a separate, slightly more aggressively sharpened and color-boosted set sized specifically for web and social sharing, since images viewed small on a phone screen benefit from punchier contrast and sharpening that would look overdone in a large print.
The habit that actually saved me the most time
It isn't any single technique above, it's resisting the urge to perfect every single image to the same standard. Hero shots get real individual attention, sometimes ten or fifteen minutes each on local adjustments. The broader supporting gallery gets efficient, consistent batch treatment and nothing more, because treating all 800 delivered images with hero-shot-level attention is the single biggest reason editing used to take me three weeks per wedding, and now takes closer to five days doing genuinely better, more consistent work.
