Behind the Scenes: How I Edit a Full Wedding Gallery

Most couples see the finished gallery arrive in their inbox and assume the editing took a few hours. In reality, the post-production for a full UK wedding — typically 8–10 hours of coverage — takes me between 25 and 40 hours spread across two to three weeks. Here is exactly what happens from the moment I eject the memory cards to the moment you receive the link.

Step 1 — Ingestion and Backup

The first thing I do when I get home after a wedding is copy every card to two separate drives simultaneously. I shoot on dual-card cameras, so by the time I sit down at my desk I already have two copies of the raw files. The third copy goes onto an external SSD that stays in a different room. Only once all three copies are verified with a checksum tool do I format the original cards.

For a typical Cambridge or South Cambridgeshire wedding I will have shot somewhere between 2,000 and 3,500 raw files across two bodies. Canon R5 raw files are large — each one is around 40 MB — so a single wedding fills roughly 100–140 GB of storage before I have touched a single slider. This is why I never promise same-week delivery; the logistics alone take a full evening.

Step 2 — Culling (The Most Time-Consuming Part Nobody Talks About)

Culling means going through every single frame and deciding what stays and what gets rejected. This is where I reduce 3,000 raw files down to the final 500–600 images that will appear in your gallery. I use Photo Mechanic for this stage because it renders previews faster than Lightroom, which matters when you are making thousands of quick decisions.

My culling criteria are strict. A frame is rejected if eyes are closed, if someone is mid-blink or mid-word, if the focus missed, or if a better version of the same moment exists two frames later. I also remove duplicates ruthlessly — I might shoot a burst of eight frames during the first kiss and keep only the best two. The goal is a gallery where every image earns its place.

For UK weddings specifically, I pay close attention to weather-driven moments. English light changes fast — a cloud moving across the sky between frame one and frame three of the same pose can make the difference between a keeper and a reject. I always flag the frame where the light is at its best, even if it means discarding a slightly better expression.

Step 3 — Colour Grading in Lightroom

Once I have my selects exported to Lightroom I begin the colour grade. I work with a base preset that I have developed and refined over several years of shooting in British light — which is notably cooler and softer than Mediterranean or California light. My preset is a starting point, not a one-click finish; every image still gets individual attention.

• ◆White balance: Church interiors, marquees, and hotel function rooms in the UK each have very different mixed-light problems. I correct each environment separately so skin tones read as natural throughout the whole gallery rather than looking warm in one room and green in another.
• ◆Exposure and highlights: Overcast English skies blow out easily. I recover highlight detail in the sky wherever possible without making the image look HDR or over-processed. The aim is a clean, editorial feel.
• ◆Shadow lift: British winter weddings often have deep shadows by 3 pm. I lift shadows gently to preserve detail in darker suits and dresses without flattening the image.
• ◆Tone curve: I apply a subtle S-curve with a slightly lifted black point, which gives the images a soft, film-adjacent quality that holds up in print as well as on screen.
• ◆HSL (hue, saturation, luminance): Skin tones vary enormously across a wedding party. I adjust the orange and red channels individually to make sure everyone — from the fairest bridesmaids to the darkest-skinned groomsmen — looks their best.
• ◆Vignette and grain: A very light vignette draws the eye inward on portraits. I add a touch of grain on images shot above ISO 3200 to unify the texture and make digital noise look intentional rather than accidental.

Step 4 — Retouching

Standard retouching is included for every image in the gallery. This means removing temporary blemishes, reducing under-eye circles caused by a late hen-do the night before, and tidying stray hairs where they are genuinely distracting. I do not alter body shape, remove permanent features, or make anyone look like a different person. My retouching philosophy is to make you look like the best version of yourself on the day — not a post-production reconstruction.

For the hero portraits — usually the couple session golden-hour shots if the weather cooperated, or the formal portraits if it did not — I spend additional time on background cleaning. A busy car park behind a country house venue, a wheelie bin lurking at the edge of a church gate, a high-visibility vest on a passing cyclist: these are UK wedding realities I deal with in Photoshop so they do not ruin an otherwise beautiful frame.

Roughly 30 images per wedding receive this deeper Photoshop work. The remaining images are retouched entirely within Lightroom. The distinction matters for workflow speed; pixel-level Photoshop edits are exported as 16-bit TIFFs, edited, saved back, and then re-exported as JPEGs, which adds time compared to a pure Lightroom workflow.

Step 5 — Quality Check and Gallery Delivery

Before I upload anything I do a final pass through all the edited images in sequence — beginning to end, the way your day unfolded. This catches consistency problems that are invisible when you look at images one by one: a section where the white balance drifts warm, a portrait that is half-a-stop darker than the one next to it, a retouch that looks fine in isolation but heavy in context. I am looking for the gallery to feel like a single, coherent body of work rather than a collection of individually correct images.

I deliver galleries through Pixieset. You receive a private link, a download PIN, and a mobile app download code. The gallery is set up with full-resolution downloads enabled so you can print at any size — I recommend at least one large canvas for the wall, as wedding images that only ever live on a phone screen are a quiet tragedy. I also include a lab print shop inside your gallery linked to a professional print lab that ships across the UK; the colour profiles are pre-matched to my edit so what you see is what you get in print.

My standard turnaround is six weeks from your wedding date, though I aim to deliver sooner in quieter months. During peak UK wedding season — May through September — I prioritise in strict date order and do not bump one couple's gallery because another couple followed up more often. You will receive a mid-process preview of 20–30 sneak-peek images within 72 hours of your wedding so you have something to share while you wait.