There’s something you should know about digital photos.
There’s something you should know about digital photos.
They need work! Back in the film days, the lab would do that… but now with digital, that finishing step is missing. And with digital, not only is that step necessary, but more can be done then ever could’ve been done with film. To not perfect the images after they’re photographed is akin to dereliction of duty!
Too many photographers are simply handing over straight out of camera (SOOC) images to their customers. Now, customers are accepting these, I think because of several reasons: One is that the quality is pretty much what they see all around so they think that’s the standard; another is with the proliferation of consumers taking digital pictures, anything with a higher megapixel count then their pocket camera looks somewhat better to them, so they equate that with being a professional image.
But it’s not. SOOC images ALL need to be adjusted. They need adjustments made in their sharpening, contrast, saturation and tone at the very least; retouching, dodging, burning, artwork done and prepped for printing at the very most.
Some photographers get around this by having their cameras create JPG image files, just as consumer grade cameras do. A JPG file is created by the camera’s tiny little ‘puter brain making these adjustments on the images at the time of capture. But there’s not much thinking the camera can do with this, those adjustments are not only very minor, but they’re also applied universally to each and every image regardless of what would work better for any particular image. JPGs also are compressed files, meaning that image data is deleted when creating the file. So details and color subtleties are crunched and lost in the final output and cannot be recovered later.
There’s another way, and that’s to have the camera record in RAW mode which is simply capturing all the data and leaving it as is for the photographer to craft it more precisely afterwards, giving the image personalized attention.
Of course that’s time and money, not too mention RAW files take up way more hard drive space then JPGs since they’re not compressed, so most studios handling large quantities of weddings choose to have their photographers shoot JPG and turn over the SOOC files and turn them over to their customers. Some “wedding factories” do run the images through some imaging software, but apply canned manipulations to them in order to process them and knock them out fast. But such canned adjustments may or may not suit any particular image, so the results are images that look over-processed, especially if their starting off with the limited data available to do anything with in a JPG file.
To give you an idea of how adjustments work to enhance a digital image, to the below left, a RAW format SOOC image (which may be good enough for most folks)- and to its right, what it can become after adjustments are individually made on it, depending on what it needs to polish it up. You’ll note that the bridal gown details aren’t lost, the setting sun’s colors are enhanced, the tones are finely gradated, sharpening’s applied as well as some burning – making the image simply stand out better.
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