I don’t even know where to begin when talking about the Katelyn James Consistency Course, what it has done for me and for my business. It has practically transformed how efficient I am, and if you know me, you know I LOVE to be efficient. There’s so much content that you get with the course that I really can’t wait to watch the videos over again to see what I get the second time around.

Editing Consistency

There is so much content in the course! Serious! SO. MUCH. One of the biggest helps for me was she completely goes through Lightroom, explains what each slider does, how it effects your images, and teaches how you need to look at patterns of your editing to be able to stay consistent. As someone completely self-taught, this was HUGE for me. I have played with Photoshop since I was little, but didn’t know much about what it took to edit a photo. I just got into editing in Lightroom within the last year, and just THAT was a huge game changer for me! Being able to batch edit is AMAZING. I can’t believe I’m saying this. I just edited it to how I thought looked best, which is what a lot of people do! I knew the importance of a good white balance, and exposure, but i didn’t know how to make my images POP! Thanks to KJ, I can efficiently have pleasant skin tones, and make my subjects pop in my images!!! Now the only problem I have is wanting to go back and re-edit all my older images!

In the before image, my skin tones were a little grey. there were heavy/dark areas in the flowers, and it was just kind of blue. After learning so much from KJ, I was able to make the image more light and airy like I initially was hoping for! I choose this image to show because I also learn something else. If you take images in harsh/bad/tinted light, fixing that is SO hard (almost impossible) in post. This image was shot during the pinkest sunset I have seen in a long time. Because of that, her skin was just pink. In order to counteract that, I had to cool down the image a TON, which is what made her skin tones blue/grey (and they’re still kind of pink!). This is probably one of THE most important things I really took out of the course! You can’t make good light better after the fact. Get in right THEN! In camera, and you’re life will be SO much easier in post!

Blogging and Blogstomp

After our in depth look at editing, we went over how Katelyn has a 48 hour workflow after a wedding. From culling on the way home, to editing ONLY the blog images first, to editing within a few days of the wedding, this lady knows how to be efficient. She breaks it down into pieces to really explain what works best for her business and why she is able to get wedding blog posts out SO quickly (usually the Tuesday after the wedding! WHAT!?!).  One of the key things she uses when it comes to blogging the images is Blogstomp! If you haven’t heard about blogstomp, your life it going to be changed.

Blogstomp is a program that allows you to make collages, or resize and “stomp” images so you can easily add them to your blog. It makes it so you can resize, collage, crop, and watermark your images in one push of a button. It’s AMAZING, and a total time saver!!

I was able to get this ADORABLE engagement session up the Monday after we shot it (on Saturday). With the quick editing from what I had just learned, and the help of Blogstomp. AWESOME!

The whole course was amazing, but what really hit me was the final week of it. I was sad when I knew that was my last week. I put off listening to the last video, but I really needed to hear it when I finally took the time to sit down and watch it.

The final video of the course was a recording of Katelyn talking at Showit United last year. United is a conference for photographers from around the world. It’s put on by Showit, which is who hosts my website and they are AMAZING!!! And I can’t wait to go to United this year, but that’s a whole other story. Katelyn comes from a family with a strong faith in God, and you can just tell when she give presentations. The way she speaks is moving, and gives you all the feels. I wrote this on FB on the consistency course group as soon as the video was over. I was full of emotions, and just couldn’t keep it all to myself:

“OH WOW!!!! I just watched the final video from week six and I’m SO bummed that I didn’t get to see it in real life at United last year. Katelyn, you are AMAZING! You can just feel the love you have for people. I love the story about your dad. I love that you love God and know that he has a purpose for you, and that your trials and troubles, but also your success were made just for you. It’s hard for us to remember that. It’s easy to forget that we’re in this business to help serve people. This course has been SO amazing for me. It’s help me really get a better grasp on editing, and FINALLY being able to get the look and style of the images I have been wanting all along, but it’s also been great getting to hear from you! It made me laugh every time you said “you guys are probably so sick of hearing my voice” in the videos, because I never thought that. I felt like the little mermaid… “I want MOOOOORE!!!