What are digital negatives?
These files have had a first round edits done on them (So they still look like professional images), no major retouching, and no resizing. They are a blank canvas, with tons of potential. However, digital negatives are NOT the images you see in my portfolio, in my albums,or on my blog. The photos we present have had extensive editing.
What type of images do I see in my gallery? In the gallery you will see digital negatives. However the photos that were shown as a preview on the blog will be fully edited. You will be able to see the difference in these two types of photos. Do not worry, any image you order as a print or that we use in an album will get the same treatment as the blog photos. It will be fully edited and retouched on the print you receive. Any collection that containes edited photos (collection 2) will also be fully retouched. If you choose to purchase a portrait collection with the entire CD of images 25 of these will also all be retouched and fully edited.
If you are a wedding client, the CD of digital negatives is what is included in the collections. As there are so many images in a wedding gallery it would take hours and hours to fully retouch and edit each individual image. On the CD I will fully edit a handful of images (20-25 of your favorites) as well as the images that are used on the blog and in the album. The digital negatives are still professional images. You also have the option to have other images fully edited at a rate of $35/hr if you choose.
Why are your photos so expensive?
The process that each image goes through before being printed can take hours, and includes skilled work, so we charge accordingly for this service. At the one-hour photo place, you are paying for the low-quality paper it is printed on, the antiquated equipment that prints it, and the two seconds it takes them to run the image through some generic tweaking (which usually makes the image WORSE, not better). When you purchase from the photographer directly, you are getting an image printed by a professional photo lab on super high-quality photographic paper and whatever time it takes us to carefully tweak and retouch the image and then calibrate it to the specific printer that our lab will be using, as well as our unconditional guarantee that if something is wrong with the print you receive, we will replace it free of charge until you are satisfied. This requires expensive computer software and hardware, as well as lots and lots of time (roughly 15-30 minutes per image). For large prints, we also have a special process that allows us to enlarge the image to virtually any size without any loss of quality. This is something that you just can’t get at one-hour photo shops.
What exactly does “editing” a photo entail?
This is truly a huge question, and hard to answer with words. It can mean increasing contrast, adjusting the white balance, changing color hues, removing pimples, slimming down unattractive body parts, opening closed eyes, erasing debris or distracting backgrounds, adding special effects like vignettes or sepia, etc. The possibilities are truly endless, and every single image requires something different.
Furthermore, each image goes through two different rounds of editing. The first round of editing is where we make minor tweaks to the image to make it presentable for proofing.
It’s much easier to answer this question visually. In the following examples, the top photo is the image straight out of the camera, the middle photo is the “proof” photo after the first round of editing (this is the image that you will see in your proofing galleries) and the bottom photo is the image after extensive retouching work that we will use for prints, albums, canvases, etc.
here is another example
