For those people who want to know what happens to our pictures before they get to you...

We shoot almost all our pictures here at Richer Sea in RAW format.  For some events where we need to move the images rapidly to our sales point or a website we shoot RAW + JPEG, but we like to have the RAW images on the card in our camera.  Why?  Because if any of our clients ever want a large print, or some complex photoshop processing from an image we have a maximum quality original to work with.

During an event we are normally sending small JPEG files to our on-site viewing system.  The images go via WiFi or 3G to our network storage device.  They are immediately copied onto our custom built on-site server, which makes them available to our viewing stations or any other viewing platforms at the event, such as big screen TVs or computers running slide-shows.

Either periodically during, or at the end of, the days shooting all our photographers copy the RAW images from their memory cards onto laptops.  The RAW files on the laptops are backed up to the network storage device or an external hard drive.

Back at the office the RAW files from the network storage device are copied onto our main editing PC.  They are then backed up again to another hard drive.   We import the images into Lightroom, converting them to the open DNG file format on the way.   This ensures that our images will be available and readable in the future if the file formats used by camera manufacturers change.

We process all our images in Lightroom, first by correcting colour and exposure for all the images we have as a group, and then looking at each individually.  As we go we select those images we are going to offer for sale and concentrate on them.   If we can we do all the image processing in Lightroom, but for some images we move to Photoshop for more advanced effects. 

Our server PC generates all the orders that have been placed during the event, and we double check these images for quailty and prepare them for printing at the size that has been ordered.  We do the same for any orders placed via our web-site.   Once the images are ready we send high quality JPEG copies to our printers.  When we have the prints we check each picture for print quality before packaging it and sending it out. 

For images ordered in large sizes or on acrylic, metal or canvas we always spend some time working in Photoshop to ensure we have produced the best file we can before we send the order to the printers.