Our next post is from Tim Halberg of Halberg Photographers:
Read the wedding magazines and they will give you check lists of things to ask your photographer: do you shoot digital or film, who will actually photograph my wedding, do you offer the digital negatives…
What the magazines don’t tell you to ask is how your digital negatives will compare to the photos you saw on your photographer’s website, the photos which drew you to their work in the first place. You need to know what the difference is between a print you will receive from the digital negatives when you upload them to your local lab vs. a finished print you will receive when ordering directly from your photographer.
Photographers prepare files for several different uses: marketing ie: their website and ads, proofing for brides/grooms to first view their images, album images and finished prints are among the most common.
Photos used for finished prints, albums and marketing have usually been processed through Photoshop to ensure the images look their VERY best. Depending on the photographer this may include adjustments that can take anywhere from a minute to an hour.
Usually printed proofs and online proofs have simply been adjusted in a digital workflow program such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture. Most photographers utilize this software to adjust brightness/exposure as well as color balance. The process is much more involved than this – but to go into detail would require an entirely separate and fairly technical article, but the end result is a photo which is close to correct for exposure and color.
With all of this in mind, there are some additional questions you may want to ask your photographer before hiring them:
*Can I see a complete wedding as delivered to a previous client for proofing (ask for more than one) – this will give you an idea of what to expect in your proof images vs. what you see on the photographer’s website.
*What does a final print look like when delivered from the photographer? – hopefully this will look very similar to what you have seen on the photographer’s website.
*What type of retouching is included in the cost of a print, and what does additional retouching cost?
*What type of adjustments/retouching will be included with the images delivered as digital negatives?
*Why should I order prints from you vs. using the digital negatives to have prints made down the street?
Your digital negatives will usually be a match to your proof images. This means if you order prints from your digital negatives from a lab down the street such as Walgreens/Walmart/Snapfish/Costco/Kodak.com your prints will not come close to the quality of what the photographer would deliver as a final print if you were to order from them (that is if the photographer does retouching when you order your prints).
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