In what was probably the coolest and best themed wedding (Pink Gothic!) that we've shot this year, Irnny & Af'fan, thanks for the honor and privilege to be part of your big day. We started off with a big dinner before the Akad Nikah ceremony at Irnny's home in Seremban. Af'fan showed his loving and gentle spirit when he shed some tears reciting his vows and responsibilities. This guy takes this very seriously and I'm sure they'll be a wonderful couple. I've never seen a pelamin covered with fresh roses before. The bersanding ceremony was held at 1388 Seremban Golf and Country club and the Pink Gothic theme was equally well executed.

This time by Kong Weng while I was batch processing about 150+ photos and assembling the 'Our Big Day' Slide show. I look more relaxed now since at this moment the photo was taken, the slide show was almost completed.

After Canon mucked up their EOS-40D firmware at version 1.0.4 (we're still waiting for 1.0.5), Adobe comes to the rescue with a quick fix on Camera Raw 4.3. Yes of course there's more changes that just making it read slightly flawed 40D raw files (only from 40D's with 1.0.4 firmware), it includes support for cameras I can't afford like the 1Ds-Mark III. It does add support to Canon's sRAW format but I don't have an sRAW file right now to test. Download the new Camera Raw over here.

Blogging live from the Sapphire Conference room of Mandarin Oriental KL City Center via Maxis HSDPA!

Image workflow... 2015 RAW images. 24 Gigabytes (including the JPEGs).

1. Tag, tag and tag images for post-processing
Images are tagged with stars (1-5) and color tags (yellow, blue, red, etc) for various purposes - PhotoBook, bulk printing, etc. First cut invariably always ends up with about 20% of the photos selected. Subsequent passes will reduce PhotoBook selection to about 60 photos.

2. Adjust white-balance, tonality, exposure and color
Photos are grouped together according to physical location (i.e. dining room, hallway, ballroom sections) to ease correction of white balance. Color, tonal curves and exposure are also tweaked. Occasional photos may require individual adjustment, others, group adjustments are made.

3. Post-Process!
For PhotoBook images, they are individually hand-processed, tweaked, adjusted, cropped and have full works from tonal adjustments to special effects done on them. They retain full resolution. Bulk printing photos are batched processed, reduced to 4 Mega-pixels for printing up to 8R (8" x 5.33") with few exceptions. All images are post-processed to ProPhoto color space and 16-bit before reduction to 8-bit sRGB images. Bulk images are saved as Quality-12 JPEGs. PhotoBook images are saved in Photoshop PSD format.

4. RJT PhotoBook Layout and styling
RJT PhotoBooks layouts are done in sRGB 16-bit for quality and flexibility. Once completed, the final pages are output as 8-bit sRGB TIFF images for printing on a Gretag LightJet Digital printer.

5. Bulk printing & PhotoBook printing
Off they go!

Perfecting the shot in Photoshop. Start with a RAW capture, Canon EOS-20D, EF16-35mm lens. The shot on the left is the unaltered RAW capture straight from the camera. Processing steps:
- RAW Conversion in Photoshop CS (slight curve adjust and WB), ProPhoto, 16bit
- Tonal Curve shifted and tweaked for shadow and highlight
- Levels and saturation boost to all channels from 125%-133%
- Adjustment layers with soft-light, screen, multiply
- Mask out areas of adjustment layers
- Flatten, smart sharpen
- Convert to sRGB, 8-bit