My Favorite Photography Programs from Editing to Delivery

There are so many wonderful photography programs out there to use, but below I highlight my top favorite culling, editing, and delivery platforms.

Photo Mechanic

Photo Mechanic is my favorite culling software that I use to cull all my sessions and weddings. For sessions, I cull straight from the SD card and only save those final culled images to my hard drive. For weddings, I cull from my hard drive as I save all RAW images plus all culled RAW images for every single wedding. I’ve used Photo Mechanic for 4 years now and while I’ve tried the new AI culling platforms, PM still remains my favorite. It’s fast and easy to use and I love that it’s a one time purchase instead of a subscription based service, but they did announce that they will be changing that soon.

Adobe Lightroom

I use Adobe Lightroom to edit all my images. It is an incredible program and with each update, it just gets better and better. I am not much of a Photoshop photographer, but I do use the program to edit distractions out of the background of my images. Since I am a true to color photographer, I really focus on getting it right in camera so that I don’t have to do too much editing in post processing. A question that I often get asked is what presets I use. I actually don’t use any presets and instead edit every single individual image. There are several new AI editing softwares out there that I have yet to try because I’m so OCD and a total perfectionist, but I hope to experiment with them soon to see what they can do. I did have an editor for a period of time in the past, but I found myself re-editing the vast majority of the gallery when I got it back so it just wasn’t worth it to me to continue down that path.

PASS PLUS

I know there has been a lot of talk about the owners behind PASS the past couple of years and while I don’t agree with everything that happened, this has been my gallery delivery platform since the very beginning. It is available on desktop and mobile app so it’s so easy to use and I love always being able to access galleries at the touch of a fingertip. It does have it’s flaws but as for now I am very happy with PASS. I love how my clients can order prints or design albums straight from their galleries that are linked to professional print labs that they can’t access anywhere else. I also love how I can send my clients specific selections to choose the images they want from their mini sessions or prints/albums for my wedding couples. Feel free to use to code VSBA3R if you want to try out a free month of PASS!

Canva

CANVA! My favorite! The online program that I use for literally everything. I use it to create my freebies, my Instagram story templates, my client style guides, and so much more! I used to use Adobe Express to create my sneak peek collages that I post to Instagram, but I have recently moved those over to Canva as well. For it being a free platform, it is incredible how much you can do. They have so many sample templates you can build off of for anything you want to create. I use it from designing my phone wallpaper to gift cards to my client guides. If you are not already using Canva in either your business or personal life, you totally should be!