ShootDotEdit introduced their Aperture workflow about a year ago, first discussed on ApertureExpert here; “ShootDotEdit Now Offers an Aperture Workflow”. I was very excited about this at the time, because ShootDotEdit were the first to offer their professional photo editing services customized for Aperture users. Basically, if you shoot big events like weddings and don’t want to do the heavy lifting for the photo edit yourself, you can outsource that to SDE. At first launch though, they did not include their “cull” service for Aperture users, which meant you still had to at least do the initial edit on your own.

However, that is no longer the case! 

Culling for Aperture users

Now ShootDotEdit offers their complete service for Aperture users; culling included. This means you can send every photo from your shoot to them, and let SDE deal with rejecting the bad ones, picking the best, and doing your image processing. The way their service works is they basically get to know you and your style, so the more you work with them, the better they get. It’s like having a personal photo editing assistant that you don’t have to pay until you need them, which makes excellent sense for busy photographers who can’t or don’t want to take on staff.

Improved Aperture workflow

ShootDotEdit has also dramatically improved the workflow process. Instead of having to follow instructions on how to set up your library, you can now download a project template that you import to your own Aperture library, and add your photos to it. It even has preset albums like “don’t cull these” (so you can ensure that a few favorites are NOT culled out), and “convert to B&W” so you can pre-select some images for conversion. Or, don’t do any of that… just import and send.

Tutorials

ShootDotEdit has a series of tutorials for submitting your Aperture projects, including videos by Sara France. If you don’t know Sara, she’s an amazing wedding photographer in San Diego (getting married? call her!) and Aperture expert in her own right, and she’s been working with SDE closely to devise this workflow.

I’ve embedded her two workflow videos below; watch these to get an idea of how easily this works, then click on through to the “Master Library Workflow” tutorial to see all the details.