As mentioned a while back, I shot another wedding this weekend. This was the first wedding that I’ve really enjoyed shooting–it was outdoors in Kirkland early in the day, the weather was great (if a bit bright for outdoor pictures), and everyone was happy to be there. Somehow, this felt smaller and more laid back then my sister’s dinky island wedding in Antigua a couple years ago, and that’s saying something. The couple clearly belongs together, and their family and friends were there to celebrate it. That’s supposed to be the point of the whole affair, but it’s been known to get lost in the middle of all of the planning.

Now that the wedding’s over, I have 750 or so pictures to take care of. That’s an improvement over the 2,000 frames that I shot at each of the two previous weddings, but I was shooting for 600. I’ll blame the happy couple and their family–I couldn’t resist the urge to take a couple extra shots here and there.

I’ve been using PhaseOne’s C1 image-processing software to process images from the wedding, and I’m mostly happy. It’s reasonably fast, easy to use, and it produces great images. I’m really impressed with the tools that it provides for tweaking your images without requiring you to jump into Photoshop.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that the cheap model, C1 LE, isn’t going to cut it for processing 750 wedding pictures. It’s limited to processing 20 pictures at a time in the background, and it can only spit out one type of output file per input file. So, late last night, I downloaded the C1 Pro trial version, and it seems quite a bit more useful–it’ll let me batch up hundreds of images at a time for overnight processing, and I’m having it spit out a full-resolution 16-bit TIFF file, a half-resolution web JPEG, and a set of color-corrected 4x6, 5x7, and 8x12 JPEGs for a local lab, all automatically.

That left just one little problem–C1 seems to leak memory. It’s currently using 335 MB of RAM on my laptop, and the total’s growing. It makes it really hard to leave C1 running in the background while I work on other work. I guess that’s the price of progress.