A lot of brides want to keep their digital files and a lot of photographers either offer to sell the files or give them with packages (I am one of them). What you do with your files or how they are stored makes all the difference in the world. Here are my suggestions.
First of all, these days most photographers shoot raw format and convert to jpg or just shoot jpeg in camera. Raw is is the digital equivalent of a film negative and jpeg, tiff, and psd files are the digital equivalent of a print. What this means is when you have an off color jeg, even doing corrections on it will produce a worse print (kind of like making a copy of a copy). Having a raw file means being able to color correct and other simple fixes and being able to go back to it if you want a different look or correction with no loss of quality.
So which would you want? Well, that depends. If you like the look of your jpegs, and you don’t want to put in time either learning photoshop or using photoshop to change your files, then the jpgs are your best bet. Especially if your photographer already has color corrected, sharpened them, and maybe added some cool effects (I do). If you do want to work on the raw files or just want to keep them for the future, you may want the raw files too but there will be an additional cost (if just for the cost of copying the files and the cost of delivery). The other side of the coin is that jpegs take much less storage space and you cannot make prints from raw files, they must be in jpeg for most labs. You should also keep at least 1 backup that is just in case you make a mistake like cropping some of your files for 8×10 prints and then saving them (bad idea). It is ok to save the files in another place or with another name but if you just save the cropped files, they are cropped forever and you will never get the parts of the pictures you cropped back again.
The other problem is how long will your computer (and future computers) be able to read and work with the files. Well, hard drives fail, CD and Dvd’s will go bad and the files on them will become corrupted. I have no idea how long or how safe their storage will be. The best solution is backing up your wedding files in at least 2 different places. The odds of 2 hard drives going bad at the same time is pretty slim. I would not count on CD or DVD since you could never know when 1 or 2 of them is bad if even if just some of your favorite files have been corrupted. That is why I do keep a backup of all my weddings on a hard drive and I assume that the copy I give the bride makes it at least 2 backups and if she follows my instructions, there will be at least a third backup too.
Now for the most controversial part of the blog. The question all wedding photographer is how much work to do on each file (above sharpening and color correcting) I should do. There is cropping, burning and dodging,darkening and lightening, blurring, and special effects. I would love to do the basic correction on all the files and take 200 or so and spend the time making the best pictures into incredible pictures. How many brides have the time and budget to print all the files a photographer (or 2) can shoot at her wedding? But that’s just my opinion. I will spend the time doing all the special stuff for prints that are going into a coffee table book, but that’s included in the price.
Kendra and Alex first dance
