Sometimes just one set of proofs had to be forwarded from one set of guests yto the next, along with their selection, and they all had to be returned to the studio along with payment, before the photographer would take out his precious set of negatives, print the enlargements, and forward them to everyone. Rarely did those negatives ever leave his careful storage and file system.
Would he give them away? No fear! His livlihood depended on them. Could he be persuaded to sell them to the clients? Perhaps, once the orders had all been filled. But they were the only copies, and if they were lost or damaged....
Hi-res files are not the same as negatives; they are not the only copies and once they have been burned to disk, they can be copied again and again; and unlike negatives, they require little skill and no knowledge of chemistry to produce adequate quality prints. The images can be displayed for all to see and copy through the internet, by e-mail, even over the phone.
But they are still valuable to the photographer, and many are loathe to give them away, or even sell them to their clients.
There are plenty of photographers who take the opposite position, and include Hi-Res files in their wedding packages (me included) but most clients simply do not have the technical know-how to understand what they are getting or to make better use of these files than files of a lower resolution.
But Hi-res files are not what people seem to think they are: digital negatives. Instead couples can finish up with minimally processed jpeg files that may technically be hi-res, but are not necessarily high-quality. So just what are these precious Hi-res files?
A hi-res file is a "high resolution" version of the file which represents your wedding photographs. You can't tellif they are hi-res files by looking at them on a TV or computer screen - they look pretty much the same as any other file/image. The same is true for the usual post card type prints and even enlargements until you try to print them bigger than A4: then, hi-res files should print better.
What is "resolution" and when is it "high" rather than low or medium? And how much resolution do you need to print pictures at different sizes?
Resolution is the ability of the picture to show fine detail (to "resolve" the difference between similar, adjacent points on the image). It is often expressed as dots per inch (DPI) and if you look at the picture on a computer or TV screen, 72 DPI looks great and in high definition, 96 DPI is wonderful. But great as they look, they are low-res images.
But a hi-res image will not look any better, because it is the screen's resolution that governs how the picture looks! If you get close to the screen, you'll see the dots (pixels) that make up the picture, and if you try to print a 96DPI photo bigger than a postcard size, that is what it will look like...all squares and jaggies: "pixelated". But if you use too many hi-res images, you could slow your system down to the point where it hangs.
What you intend to do with the photos determines how high the resolution should be: on your home inkjet printer, you will get a nice print from just about any .jpeg that comes off any camera up to 5x7 inches: about 1/2 an A4 sheet. Any photo taken on a digital camera with more than 6 megapixels will produce a perfectly acceptable A4 or larger image: you don't need an epecially "high resolution" to achieve nice prints at home, but take the same file to a gallery or offer it to a stock photo company to sell and they will turn up their noses at it.
For commercial printing, the standard is 300 DPI, although the kind of printer makes a difference, and so does the size you are going to print at and the surface of the print (canvas is rough and hides imperfection, gloss shows up faults more easily). You can readily save your photos at this kind of resolution (it will still be just 72 dpi on screen), and then it is the file size that determines how large you can print, not just the camera resolution (more on this later).
Resolution on the screen or the printer is not the same as your camera's resolution, expressed in Megapixels. That is the number of light sensitive cells on the sensor. All else being equal, the more cells capturing light, the greater the detail the image will have. But all things are not equal.
A cell phone with an 8 megapixel sensor is not the same as an 8 megapixel camera of any kind, let alone a pro-specication SLR!
The size of the sensor counts more than how many pixels are bonded to it and phone cameras have tiny sensors. That means they also have tiny sensors sites, crammed very close together: large pixels, spread well apart, produce cleaner, more detailed pictures.
The same thing affects cameras at each level of photography. point-and-shoot cameras are better than phone cams, 4/3 cameras are better again, DSLRs are better still, full frame DSLRs trump them, and medium format cameras leave them all in the shade. This is mainly about progressively bigger sensors.
The size of the file each camera type produces is also important. A 14 megapixel image from a compact camera like one of the "superzoom" or "bridge" camera produces a file that is much smaller and much less capable of enlargement than the image produced by an 8 megapixel DSLR, because the SLR has a physically larger sensor with larger individual pixels and more space between them (resulting in less heat and cosequently, less "noise") allowing it to capture and process more information, but also because the larger camera has more computing power on board. And a "full frame" SLR is better again. Would you want hi-res images from a compact camera or medium res images from an SLR? No contest: take the SLR!
The sensitivity setting, light levels, sharpening, kind of sensor, and the type and quality of the lens all have their influence, too, so that a high quality 10 megapixel camera with a profesional lens (think Leica, for instance) will deliver far greater image detail than a 14 megapixel consumer level camera.
I have a 4 megapixel camera which prints beautiful, detailed A3 sized prints, and a 12 megapixel camera which struggles to make an acceptable A4 print - 3x the megapixels, 1/2 the print size. When I save the files, the better image registers as a lower-res file.
There is more to it than megapixels and resolving power.
The photographer who offers a cheap Wedding Package in which all images are delivered as "Hi-res images on CD" is either giving you very few pictures (say 150 or so) or his definition of Hi-res is misleading. Why? Because hi-res images of real quality are very large. Typically, I need 2 DVDs (not CDs) to deliver the files from a wedding shoot.
There are more important questions to ask about the photos delivered on disk than the resolution. How much editing will the photographer do, and will all the files be fully edited and prepared for printing, or only a selection?
Many photographers have embraced the low-cost "Shoot and Burn" approach because it saves them time and effort. They take the photos, do a quick review to eliminate any obviously poor pictures, and burn everything to disk. They have already been paid, and met their contract obligations to supply everything on disk, so they have no further interest in the job.
If you take the pics off to a mini-lab and get back prints you are unhappy with, or buy a budget department store or on-line photobook and and disappointed with the pictures, that's not his concern. Not in the way it would have been if he had to ensure that the finished product was of professional standard. That relies on the original images being professionally prepared.
It is worthwhile asking if the images will shot as jpeg or RAW files. Both can produce nice results, but in shooting RAW the photographer has committed to work with the highest quality images their equipment can produce: it is an investment in time and a promise to only deliver a top quality product to you at the end of the day.
Why is this? Because you cannot display or print RAW files directly; they have to be processed first, and that means every image will occupy the photographer's attention after the shoot.
The technical bit: RAW files preserve all of the colours, tones and shades originally captured by the camera ~ A 12 bit RAW file gives 4096 levels of information for every pixel; an 8 bit JPEG has 256. Think 16,000,000 colours vs 64,000.
Working in RAW lets you adjust and balance and compensate for the conditions and effects you want so much more - at the end of the day, the photographer will have to convert to jpegs for the client, but those jpeg files will be as close to perfect as they can be. And no matter what else happens, the RAW images will still be there, unchanged.
One final point about Hi-res files: I mentioned already that high quality files are BIG. One reason for using .jpeg files is that they take up less space than other image files. They do this by compressing the data that represents your photographs. That's good; but the method they use to compress the files discards some information, which is bad. Starting when you press the shutter button, and every time the file is saved from then on, the jpeg system compresses the file again, discarding more information each time, and that is bad, too: eventually, the file can become visibly corrupted.
There are various levels of compression possible with jpegs, which allows you to do things like put them on line or send them in an e-mail without using up all your drive space or band-width, which is good, but every time you resend, you compress more, which is.... well, you get it.
My point is, forget worrying about getting hi-res images: if you are going to get your photos on a disk from a competent wedding photographer, they will be of sufficiently quality for the purposes you discuss with him; but it is worthwhile to ask him to give you files that have been processed from RAW and have minimal compression applied; and ask whether she will keep back-up files for you; and if so for how long, and if there will be a charge for a new set of images on disk.
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