February and March are really busy months for me in my full-time job. I am traveling for business alsmost the whole time, and I do not schedule photo sessions during those months. So there will be no new wedding and engagement images coming up soon.
Instead, I would like to spend this time answering questions that brides often have about digital photography: retouching, photoshop, and how does it matter for my wedding images?
After all, for decades photographer did very little retouching on professional film images, and everything turned out just fine. Why do I need digital retouching for my portraits?
Curious? Well, it is a lengthy subject, so let's attack it one blog post at a time.
Let's start with the basics.
Professional digital cameras are set up with a different expectation compared to consumer camreas. The are not optmized to prduce their best looking images straight out of the camere, The design intent is to capture as much data as possible and give the photographer as much flexibility in editing the image on the computer after the image is taken.
So, if your photgrapher does not do basic retouching for digital files, you are losing out on photo quality.
Let me explain this a bit more.
When you use your little digital camera to take a picture, it captures the image in JPG format and you open it on your computer. The picture usually looks bright, with good contrast, but is often a little blurry, especially when you zoom in a little closer. But overall, straight out of the camera and onto your computer screen - it looks pretty good. if you sent it to print - home printer or mail-in lab like Shutterfly.com or Kodakgallery.com - it normally looks ok, but rarely looks excellent. Your camera software optmizes the image to look it's best on screen straight out of the camera. Can you get it to look great in print? Yes, probably.. but you need digital retouching to override original camera settings.
When your wedding or portrait photographer takes a photo with a professional digital camera, it captures the image in RAW format. (Ok, it can capture JPG images too. But if your photographer is shooting JPG on assignment, you should probably find another photographer.) RAW format has amazing flexibility for color, brightness and sharpness correction. RAW format brings the best out of your images - for screen and print. But... when you take a RAW image and open it on your computer, it really does not look that great straight out of the camera. And the file size is at least 3 times bigger than JPG, so it opens slowly and painfully. When it does, it is very neutral: colors are a bit dull, contrast is a bit bland, sharpness is not really there. It requires retouching work in specialized editing software to bring the best out of it. Once that work is done, you can save the result as a JPG file that will look amazing on screen and in print - way better than if you have taken the exact same image in JPG format.
I hope this explains why you should always make sure that your photographer takes RAW images and does at least basic retouching on all of them.. if it does not happen, you've just hired a Ferrari with a driver who just won't go faster than 20 mph! Don't let that happen to your wedding or portrait images, ever!
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