If you have, then you are either an uber-nerd or a photographer that’s editing. I happen to fall into both categories. Welcome to my geeky world where an hour of listening to investigative reporting on the effects of toxic investments on the economic meltdown sounds like a pretty good time while achieving natural skin tones.

When it comes to processing images, podcasts have become my life-savers. I have found several sixty-minute, thirty-minute, and fifteen-minute podcasts that I basically use to time myself during afternoons of culling and editing. Cull an engagement shoot? That’s an hour-long This American Life. Edit the blog images from a wedding? A thirty minute interview from Fresh Air. Receive a wedding back from ShootDotEdit and finalize for proofing? I’ll cue up a fifteen minute 99% Invisible podcast with Roman Mars.

But this wasn’t always the case. Before we started using Photo Mechanic to cull our images, I needed an entire AUDIOBOOK to finish a job. Watch my quick screencast and see how we use Photo Mechanic to quickly and effectively cull, sort, tag, and prep our images before editing them in Lightroom 4. Our culling time was cut in HALF with this simple, easy, and inexpensive program!

In this screencast, I demo how Jeff and I edit our wedding and engagement images in Adobe Lightroom 4. This isn’t a tutorial on how to use Lightroom, it’s simply an explanation of the editing process we use to achieve our natural style for our wedding and engagement shoots.

I even give away our ‘secret ingredient’…

This screencast is open to our newsletter subscribers only, so sign up to receive our updates and you’ll be sent the exclusive password for subscriber-only content just like this. For those of you who’ve been with us a while, the password is the same as last time. If you’ve forgotten it, just enter your e-mail address in the subscribe area to the right and you’ll be sent the password again (don’t worry, you won’t end up with multiple subscriptions!)

Enjoy!

Now have you ever recorded a 20 minute screencast? Ick, ick, ick.

ICK.

I had to crawl under my desk when I heard my voice play back on this – my very first ever screencast. The sound of my own voice felt like somebody completely different. Am I really that high-pitched? Is that why everybody backs up when I speak? I always thought it was my breath… But Jeff just smiled at me from across the room, leaned back in his ergonomic desk chair, stretched his arms up high, yawned, and said, “Great job sweetie. That was pretty awesome for your first time.”

In this screencast (again, my first ever), I demo how Jeff and I edit our wedding and engagement images in Adobe Lightroom 3. This isn’t a tutorial on how to use Lightroom, it’s simply an explanation of the editing process we use to achieve our natural style for our wedding and engagement shoots.

I even give away our ‘secret ingredient’…

This screencast is open to our newsletter subscribers only, so sign up to receive our updates and you’ll be sent the exclusive password for subscriber-only content just like this.

Enjoy!

Things we referenced in this video : Jared Platt’s Lightroom Workshops

If you have a question that hasn’t been answered already, check out the info at the bottom of this post for how to submit. You never know, it just may be featured here on the bloggy-blog!

On with today’s question…

What program do you guys edit in?

We use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for our post production, and we completely adore it. Lightroom is a tool that fits perfectly into our workflow, which is the most important thing when selecting your editing platform. The great thing about Lightroom is that you’re able to use presets to automate a lot of the routine tasks you do in editing (kind of like actions in Photoshop, but way cooler) and additionally you’re able to process multiple images at the same time. In other words, if you’ve got 10 images with the same lighting, exposure, etc, you can just grab all those images and tweak them uniformly at once.

If you haven’t had a chance to play around with Lightroom, Adobe has a fully functional 30 day free trial on their website.

Do you guys do your own editing? Or do you outsource to somebody else?

In light of the first question, I should mention that we don’t actually process our wedding images ourselves - Colorati does that for us, and they do an amazing job. Like, amazing. We feel that our clients deserve all their images to be processed to the highest standards on an extremely consistent basis, which is why we outsource that portion of our business. Check them out - you won’t be disappointed.

***In response to a recent question, I thought I’d expand a bit on how we integrate Colorati into our process, since that’s a great question! After a wedding, Erin will actually go through and cull the images down to what we consider to be our “keepers”. Typically this equates to about 600-700 images per wedding, which we’ve found to be a pretty ideal amount for our clients.

Then we send those off on a portable hard drive to Colorati, have them do all the color correction and then they e-mail us the XMP files (which are the files that tell Lightroom what to do with the RAW images), we render them in Lightroom, and BOOM – we have all of Colorati’s edits dialed in. Pop on over to Colorati’s Blog to see a demo of how to use XMP’s in your workflow.

We LOVE answering questions from our readers (we’re not kidding, it’s the best part of this blog). Head over to our UserVoice page and vote with others on topics you’re dying to hear about!

***As always, make sure to read through the current Reader FAQ posts to make sure your question hasn’t been answered already!***

Confession: I’ve been avoiding this question…

We’re totally digging on our Uservoice page and stoked on all the thoughtful questions people have been asking and voting on, and this is one that has slowly risen to the top, and now I simply can’t ignore it.

The truth is that the answer to this question is super simple for me to state with a quick do this, this, and this, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the most helpful way of explaining this. So, I’m going to do my best to give you some solid tips & tricks to get the skin tones in your images to look more natural and authentic.

All things being equal, your clients will 1) be the most happy with their images and 2) look their best if their skin looks as “naturally” perfect as possible. As much as a photographer cares about the artistry, backgrounds, light, and composition of his or her images (all very important) the thing most clients care about is looking beautiful and natural.

Simply stated, the best way to get your clients to look their best and have the most natural skin tones is to shoot the image “properly” at the time of capture. There’s no magic post processing tricks to get natural skin tones (although there’s a bunch of Photoshop actions that try pretty hard) – it’s really all about how you capture the image.

So when you’re shooting for clean, clear, creamy skin tones, here’s three big tips straight from Casa de Youngren:

1. Shoot in RAW

This used to be a much bigger debate than it is now (referring to the RAW vs JPG debate) but now that camera processing speeds have gotten faster and storage has gotten cheaper, I don’t really see a reason why you shouldn’t be shooting RAW. There’s a ton of great reasons to shoot in RAW (just do a quick search for the RAW vs JPG debate, or check out this article on the RAW format) but the primary reasons for shooting in RAW in relation to skin tone would be 1) the ability to adjust color temperature / white balance after the fact and 2) the fact that the amount of data contained in a RAW image is exponentially greater than that contained in a JPG file.

While a majority of the time we find ourselves setting our white balance manually while we’re shooting, if we don’t nail the color temperature during the shoot, we’re able to adjust it after the fact to give the most appealing skin tones possible. In addition, since RAW files contain so much more color information, we’re able to make fine adjustments to get things perfect.

2. Great Light > Great Background

When selecting a location to shoot, if you have the ability to choose between two locations, ALWAYS choose the one with the better light over the better background. Light wins, every time. When it comes to great light, there’s two major components: 1) Quantity 2) Quality.

Quantity can be thought of as a measure of how much light is present – or how bright the light is. Generally speaking, more light is better especially for the accurate representation of colors, which is what this discussion is all about. More important, though, is Quality, which can be thought of in terms of how pleasing the light actually is. Harsh sunlight on someones face has a lot of Quantity, but not a lot of Quality. Conversely, imagine sunlight striking a giant white building on the street, reflecting off that building and producing a soft, white light that illuminates your subject in a flattering way. That’s quality light.

Use your hand. The easiest way to make a judgement about the quality of the light is to hold your hand out in front of your face, at arms length, and look at the skin on the palm of your hand. That soft, pinkish skin is similar to facial skin, so the palm of your hand will tell you how someone’s skin tone will look in the light you’re choosing. Move your hand around, and study how the light changes on your hand while turning in different directions. This is something that we do all the time – just ask our clients. When we’re walking around on a shoot, we’re constantly checking our hand and looking for a skin tone that is bright, clean, and true-to-life – not super red, green, or blue – but a fresh, balanced white.

To get an idea of what I mean, here’s a few exercises to try. First, go find a room that is dark and only illuminated by a window, and hold your palm a few feet away from the window facing toward the window. Notice that the quality of light is very even and pleasing on your hand, right? Now slowly move away from the window (where it becomes darker) and watch how that light changes quite quickly. Now go outside and find a big shady spot like the shade of a building or a tree. Stand right at the edge where the shadow ends, and hold your palm facing out away from the shadow while walking forwards and backwards (if your body is facing towards a building, for example, you’re palm will be facing towards your face away from the shadow). Notice how quickly the light changes on your hand as you move deeper into the shadow, and how nice and creamy the light is right at the border of the shadow and the harsh light. As you do this in different environments (by trees, different colored buildings, near water, near glass buildings) you’ll begin to “see” how light changes, where it’s reflecting, and where to position your subjects for the best skin tones.

Here’s a great example of this “edge of shade” concept. While shooting the fabulous Christian and Nicole recently, we found this little green corner that was filled with even shade. Plus, there was a white building across the street that was throwing white light into the shade. We placed Christian and Nicole at the very edge of the shade, let them do their fabulous thing, and boo-yeah. Gorgeous skin.

[Both images: Canon 5D Mark II. Left: ISO 100, 1/250th @ f/2.0 @ 50mm on the 50 f/1.2. Right: ISO 100, 1/320th @ f/2.0 @ 85mm on the 85 f/1.8.]

3. Exposure, Exposure, Exposure

I know, this is an obvious one, and I almost didn’t mention it, but I think that the importance of exposure can’t ever be underestimated. While the RAW format allows you to make exposure mistakes and correct them, that doesn’t mean that you should rely on that safety net when shooting. It’s always best to have a properly exposed image, straight out of the camera to begin working with, and there’s a couple of ways to accomplish this.

Use your histogram. Briefly, the histogram is a tool to help you understand what types of light are present in your image from a data perspective, and will help guide you to create a proper exposure. It’s an outline of how much of the image is comprised of darkness and how much is comprised of lightness, and all the levels in the middle. Here’s a link to a great discussion on understanding your histogram.

Buy or borrow a handheld light meter. Light meters are a necessity with studio light setups, but they definitely have their place for shooting in natural light, too. While I’m not saying you need to go out and buy a light meter, it would definitely be worth your time to borrow one from a friend and just carry it around to a few shoots and observe some solid data about the light that you’re in, and how the light meter suggests you expose your shots. All cameras have a light meter built into them, but they only measure reflective light amounts, meaning the light that hits an object, bounces off of it, and then hits the camera’s meter. A handheld light meter will tell you more information about the ambient light in your scene that would be hitting your clients directly, which is much more valuable information. I’ve got the Sekonic L-358, and it’s great. You can borrow it from me anytime, in exchange for a bottle of Ridge wine, my favorite

Overexpose. But just a little bit. If there’s any “tricks” that we do, it’s that we tend to overexpose skin tones a touch, by about 1/3 stop, all the time. When your eye sees an image, it confuses brightness for smoothness, so if we overexpose for skin, we’ll get it looking a little brighter and therefore a little smoother and appealing. This is a really delicate thing as if you overexpose by too much (say, a full stop) you’re going to get into some issues with white balance. So use this trick sparingly, and with practice.

Hopefully this helps – if you have any follow-up questions, or if I can clarify anything, please be sure to leave a comment. And of course, if you’ve got a burning question you’ve been dying to ask, head on over to our UserVoice page and ask away (or vote for the questions your interested in!)

And because posts are always cooler with images, here’s a sneek-peek of Shannon & Dwayne’s engagement session that we’ll be featuring next week right here! And since this post is all about skin tones, here’s some technical data for you.

[Canon 5D Mark II, ISO 400, 1/250th @ f/2.0 @ 85mm on the 85 f/1.8. Taken just after the sun dipped below the horizon, to my rear.]

So I’m going to outline how we backup our images and our system, and hopefully this will be helpful for those that either don’t have a backup system or have one that is causing more pain than gain.

I want to preface this post by saying that this may not be the absolute best way of doing things (there are tons of options out there), but I think it’s a pretty darn good backup system and I would definitely recommend it to other photographers.

The first thing to note is that if you’re not backing up your images, you absolutely need to be. Its the same as having mandatory backup gear at our photo shoots – if we don’t have a second line of defense against digital image loss, we’re playing with fire. In today’s digital world, it is much easier for image information to be lost or corrupted, and we need to have the attitude that our information will be lost, not if. A wedding is a once in a lifetime event and its our professional responsibility to keep our clients’ images as safe as we possibly can.

There are three rules to abide by when it comes to creating your backup schematic: 1) Redundancy 2) Redundancy and 3) Redundancy. You must have multiple layers of backup. Simply backing up to a external hard drive you bought from Costco isn’t going to cut it. Every hard drive WILL fail at some point, it’s only a question of when. So putting all your eggs in one basket (like using one external hard drive) is not the best idea. What will you do when (not if) that one hard drive fails with all of your images on it? See the need for multiple backups?

So here’s what we do in our backup schematic. I thought it would be most helpful to talk through this in chunks, and I’ll explain the ins-and-outs along the way.

Downloading from CF Cards & Initial Backup

We use PhotoMechanic to download our images because we’re able to use several (3 typically) of our Lexar Firewire Card readers which can download multiple cards simultaneously, and PhotoMechanic is the best program out there that can work with multiple card readers at once. Also, PhotoMechanic gives us the ability to rename the files upon import according to our specific studio’s naming convention AND copy the images to two locations while importing. This means we have images importing to our working drive (the drive we use to work with our images) as well as our external backup system (a Drobo – more on that later). We do this as soon as we get home from a wedding, so before we go to bed that night there’s three copies of every image: 1) on the CF cards which aren’t cleared until just before the next shoot 2) on the working drive and 3) on the Drobo.

External Backups: Drobos

The Drobo is a unique tool because it’s not just an ordinary external hard drive. The Drobo is a type of RAID system where the actual Drobo enclosure contains multiple drives (4 or 8 depending on the model). The Drobo will then duplicate your information across those drives in such a way that if one of the drives in the Drobo failed, no data would be lost. In other words, if you ejected one of the drives, the Drobo would reconfigure all of your information across the remaining drives, keeping all of your data intact. You can just throw away the ejected or failed drive and put a new one in its place. The Drobo would then reconfigure across the drives and everything would be back to normal. This can sound much more complicated than it really is, and there’s a really good detailed explanation of how this works on the Drobo website. They’ve got a great demo video that should help explain some things much better than we can here!

We’ve got two Drobos on-site one that holds an Archive of finished RAW images (and Lightroom catalogs) and one that holds all the untouched RAW data once we get back from a shoot. We call these DroboArchive and DroboVault, respectively. It’s important to note that images in the Vault are considered to be untouchable – we don’t ever touch them, unless we need to restore a deleted file. All “work” is done on the copy of the files that lives on our local internal drives.

Internal Backup: The System and Working Drives

It’s easy to focus on the external backup of our images, but sometimes people forget completely about all their applications, client files, financial records, & client communications. Can you imagine what would happen if all your records of all your clients and financials was wiped out suddenly? Yikes. For us, this information is contained on our internal drives – the drives that are actually contained within our 8 Core MacPro. We have two main internal drives: 1) a 500GB system drive which contains all of our applications, client files, financial records, word documents, etc. and 2) a 1TB working drive which is what we use to process our images. Both of these drives has a duplicate hard drive that functions as a backup, which makes our total number of internal hard drives four (you following so far?). We use an application called SuperDuper which will, at midnight every night, duplicate our main drives to their backup drives within our MacPro. This means that our system drive and our working drive both get duplicated each night, every night, without us doing anything. Since SuperDuper uses an incremental approach to duplication, the app just copies the files that are new or have changed, so on the average night a duplication of our 1TB drives takes about 5 minutes. There’s a free version of SuperDuper, but the paid version is the one that lets you schedule backups. You can also have it do this backup procedure multiple times a day, if you’re so inclined.

Off Site Backup

This is the big hurdle in every backup schematic, and with the sheer amount of data that we generate, an over-the-internet approach is just simply too slow. Backing up through the internet can work fine if you’re not shooting much, but when you have a bunch of back-to-back shoots, the system just gets clogged up (I speak from experience!). What we’re currently doing is backing up files as soon as we’ve imported them to bare hard drives using an eSATA dock. We then take these drives, put them in an anti static bag, and then into a padded anti-static shipper, and then go drop the drive off at a neighbor’s house. This is some manual work, but it’s the best solution for now. I’m currently trying out another hair brained idea, so more on that later (if it works).

Preserving the Final Images

All that we’ve discussed so far is for the original images, which in our case are all RAW images. It’s also important to have backups of your final (JPG) images that result after they have been processed and color-corrected. We use Pictage to host all our image galleries (love them) and one of the many benefits to using Pictage is that they’ll retain backups of all our final images indefinitely, behind multiple layers of redundancy. So if everything else fails, we still have copies of the final images in multiple locations, thanks to Pictage.

One More Backup: BackBlaze and ShootQ

At this point, it may sound ridiculous to back things up one more time, but seriously peeps, this business is your livelihood and you can’t be protected enough. This is where Backblaze and ShootQ come in.

Backblaze is an internet backup service that runs in the background of our systems and is constantly making sure that there is always a complete backup of our system online on their servers. Since Backblaze is only working on our system drive, this doesn’t take any time (or bandwidth) since we’re not really creating large files or making major changes on the system drive like we do on our working drive. It’s $5 month, and completely worth it. They have a free trial that’s worth checking out over on their site. This is different from a solution like Time Machine in that it’s backing up everything off site, instantly.

ShootQ is a studio management service that we completely love. All our client communications, contracts, & invoices are all contained in the ShootQ system and it allows us to be almost completely paperless, which is awesome! Aside from being powerful and easy to use, all the information that is in ShootQ is backed up by the folks at ShootQ redundantly.

Putting it all together

To Recap, here’s a list of the hardware & software we use in our backup schematic:

• 8 Core MacPro with 2 1TB drives & 2 500GB drives (1 System, 1 Working, and two mirrors of System & Working)
• 2x Drobos (1 remote, 1 local, each with 4 500GB drives, which can be upgraded as we need more storage)
• PhotoMechanic for the Download and immediate duplication of Images from CF Cards
• SuperDuper for internal duplication of System & Working drives & remote duplication of Drobo
• Backblaze for remote (internet/cloud) backup of system files and records
• ShootQ for housing contracts, client relations, invoices and serving as the backbone of our Studio.
• Pictage for hosting our images once we’re done processing them & retaining backups of final images on their servers indefinitely.

If you’ve actually read this far, then major props goes to you!! I know there’s a ton of information here, but building a fully functioning, reliable backup system that won’t screech your business to a complete halt if something fails is PRICELESS. Be sure to consult your IT guy with any backup system you’d like to put in place to make sure it’s the right fit for you. Whatever you do, don’t ‘wing it’ when it comes to your backup system. Put something in place NOW that makes sense. This is a much better investment than the next camera or next lens. To put things in perspective, professional recovery of a 500GB drive will start at around $1,500. Yikes.

Follow up questions from the comments:

Tonhya asked: What backup suggestions would you make for people that can’t necessarily afford a full-blown automated backup system?

While backing up you images and records is one of the most important things in your business, I realize that not everybody can afford to invest in the necessary tools to have a full blown system in place, especially people just starting out. So, on a limited budget there are three things I would do, without a doubt. 1) Begin using a service to host your final images that backs them up for you. Like I discussed earlier, Pictage does this for us. Not only do they serve as a place for us to do our online proofing/ordering for our clients, they also backup our final images. 2) Use an automated system to backup your system files and records like BackBlaze or Mozy (or others). It’s critical that you don’t lose your records for many many reasons. At $5/month, this is a no brainer. 3)Purchase multiple external hard drives and duplicate/mirror them on a regular basis. A 1TB external from Costco is around $100, buy two of those and use one as your working drive, and dupe your working drive to the other one on a daily basis using SuperDuper or a similar utility. This is NOT a permanent solution, but it’s a start while you build up the capital to invest in a solution that has multiple layers of redundancy.

Shannon asked: What happens when all that space is filled? Do you ever use DVDs?

Part of the beauty of the Drobo is that as you run out of space in the disk array, you’re able to replace/swap drives out for larger ones. This is explained in the demo video on Drobo’s website and what it does is essentially creates limitless storage (to a certain extent). This gets rid of the need to have to keep buying new external drives every time you fill one up, or backing up to DVD’s. The problem with using DVD’s in your backup system is two fold 1) It’s a time consuming process – shooting RAW means an average wedding will take 25 DVD’s to back up. Talk about a misuse of time! 2) Optical media can go bad, too if stored improperly. The main reason we don’t use DVD’s to back up is because it’s one more thing we have to do and set aside time to accomplish. By automating the immediate backup upon (as discussed above) it’s a step we don’t need to even think about.

It’s FABULOUS.

When we dream, we dream together. When we travel, we travel together. When we shoot, we shoot together. We when we wake up, go to bed, work all day, eat our lunch, make our dinner, go to meetings, head to happy hour, and scoot around town – you got it – we’re TOGETHER.

As my cheerleading squad in high school would say, “that’s a whole lotta togetherness.”

And as most of our friends ask us, “Ummmm, how do you do it without, you know… strangling each other?”

There’s so much that goes into that answer (we’re best friends, we know our boundaries, we keep business outside of the bedroom), but there’s definitely one key thing that has helped us succeed as business partners while keeping our marriage intact.

The Power of Closed Systems

When it comes to ‘sleeping with your business partner’ (as my friend Lizzy calls it), Jeff and I are big believers in closed systems. By sticking to this kind of internal organization within our business, we’ve been able to avoid contention and frustration on several levels – business and personal.

What do I mean by closed systems?

A closed system means that our roles in the business are completely separated from each other – we don’t have to rely or wait on each other to get a job done.

For example, I am in charge of the blog for our business, so that means that I edit the images that go on the blog, I write the posts, I schedule the blog calendar, I promote the posts via social media, and I approve anything that relates to the blog.

In fact, my job title is Chief Deputy of the Blogosphere and Blogosphere Relations. (It makes me feel super official.)

This kind of autonomy means that I don’t ever have to rely on my husband in order to do my job well. I don’t have to pester, nag, or generally harass him over job tasks, which builds an atmosphere of trust, confidence, and faith in the office. We avoid tons of fights this way – BUH-LEIVE me. I don’t have to wait on him, and he doesn’t have to wait on me. We just get stuff done.

You May Need to Restructure

Many times, the biggest objection that I hear from married photographers when I talk about closed systems is that in order to close a system, one of them will have to learn a new skill set.

For example, when I took over the blog about a year into our business, we quickly realized that my newbie self would have to learn how to color correct our images in order to manage the full system. It was a completely foreign skill to me, but Jeff patiently taught me everything I needed to know and checked my work until I became good at it and could take over the photo editor role in our business, which is a role that I still hold to this day (and yes, that role is a closed system too).

So don’t be afraid to learn new skills in order to close a system. You’re a business owner. If you’re in this for the long haul, then you need to do whatever it takes to build an efficient, flexible internal structure that will be able to expand along with your workload. Jeff was the person that already knew what he was doing with editing and image management, but if we were going to close the blog system, I had to step out of my comfort zone early on.

But in the end, that major restructure helped our business thrive when a much bigger workload came along.

Play to Your Strengths

The key to creating closed systems is playing to your unique skill sets. I thrive on day-to-day task management, so not only am I the Blog Goddess and Photo Queen (when you create your own job, you get to create your own name), I also double as Ms. Office Manager and Madam Album-Sauce.

Jeff is the forward-thinking strategic CEO-type, so he’s the IT Genius, Financial Guru, and Branding / Marketing Gentleman (and Scholar).

So maybe closing a system doesn’t mean that one person has to learn how to edit, but one person could learn how to write for the blog. Or perhaps it means that you need to rethink the blog so that it doesn’t focus on writing, but focuses on a different strength one of you exhibits. Is one of you really good at discovering fun, relevant content on the web? Like finding music, art, videos, or inspiration your ideal client would love?

There are a lot of ways to get creative when it comes to separating your job roles, so don’t feel like you have to structure your business exactly how we do.  We’ve just found that a big part of our success – both in our business and in our marriage – has been closing our systems.

And the best part about keeping functions so isolated? If you decide to hire employees or outsource a certain piece of your business, each job role detaches itself so easily that you’ll be amazed. You might even do an Irish jig of joy in front of that brand new employee. I mean…

If you have a question that hasn’t been answered already, check out the info at the bottom of this post for how to submit. You never know, it just may be featured here on the bloggy-blog!

On with today’s question…

Who do you use to print your albums?

The albums we offer are KISS and Queensberry – KISS for digital flushmount, and Queensberry for unique and elegant Duo albums. We’ve selected these two manufacturers out of the immense pool of album production companies because they share a few key traits in common: 1) they’re the absolute best at the type of album they make, 2) their customer service is impeccable and 3) they’re constantly pushing the boundaries of their craft.

If you’re in a place where you’re deciding which albums you’d like to offer your clients I think the biggest (and most helpful) question to ask yourself is WHY you are choosing a specific vendor. Don’t just begin using a particular vendor because of my (or anyone else’s) recommendation – do your homework and make sure that they’re a good fit for YOU and your clients. We’ve been using KISS since they first began, and we have at least 20 albums (not including parent albums or samples) produced through them every year, so we stand behind them 100%. We sell a handful of Queensberry Duo albums every year and they have always been on top of their customer service. We definitely recommend them for studios seeking a high quality matted option.

We LOVE answering questions from our readers (we’re not kidding, it’s the best part of this blog). Head over to our UserVoice page and vote with others on topics you’re dying to hear about!

***As always, make sure to read through the current Reader FAQ posts to make sure your question hasn’t been answered already!***