How Adventure Studios use star rating for proofing

Adventure Studios is an advertising image production studio with 20+ years of experience and based in Minnesota. We’re talking today with photographer John Linn and digitech Brad Alexenko:

“We pride ourselves on being capable to capture everything from authentic lifestyle in the field, to shiny products in the studio. Our clients include the largest brands in the off-road and marine transportation segments, along with energy contractors and the medical industry.“

Many of their shoots result in thousands of shots per day to be selected from, especially those that involve vehicles in motion or people and expressions. With a full-time digital technician on staff, having an efficient post-production workflow and high-end retouching and delivery are extremely important for their clients.

John describes how they worked before PhotoDeck: “Following a need for brand creatives to remotely review and select images for retouching, starting around 2005 we built a gallery proofing system based on PhotoShop/Bridge scripts and a small server, but with over 100,000 images posted to this system each year, it became burdensome to maintain and safeguard. So in early 2022 we became one of the first non-enterprise level clients for an online service called GlobalEdit. Many challenges in two years of working with GE led to a search for a better solution.”

He continues: “PhotoDeck rose to the top, being one of surprisingly few online services that could provide easy-to-use client galleries utilizing star rating and filtering to facilitate image selection.“

Their workflow is now well oiled:

On the day following a shoot, they’ll have all images available on a PhotoDeck password-protected online client gallery made with medium-resolution, watermarked .JPGs. It is not uncommon to have 10.000 viable images at this point. Clients or creatives then use the star rating system to progressively cull the images down to the “five star” selections they'd like retouched. This can be a single image or over 500.

Brad then retouches those and replaces the five stars in the gallery with full-resolution delivery files ready for download. The entire gallery remains online indefinitely where clients can download finished files or review the entire shoot for further review and selection anytime.

John details how customizability and flexibility were key requirements: “With such a high quantity of images we needed an easy-to-use solution but also one which could be customizable enough to fit our workflow needs. JF and the PhotoDeck team were perfectly approachable through the research stage, answering questions and even offering some early minor tweaks to perfect the system for us.“

John continues: “Within just a few months of implementation, we now have over twenty separate client portals uploaded, making literally hundreds of thousands of images available to clients and creatives to review and download instantly for their always urgent image needs. Furthermore, PhotoDeck made it easy to customize the look to match up seamlessly within our existing marketing website and branding. With domain prefix forwarding it's an easy transition from the PhotoDeck review galleries to our marketing website and back for a truly professional web user experience.“

At the top of their wishlist for future PhotoDeck developments are an image compare function, a loupe feature, and continued refinement for the star-rating implementation.

Learn more about our proofing galleries ›