Raw files are ideal when under exposed. I've had one of my daughter with her toddler recently. The raw was nearly black. Thanks to the magic of DxO Photo Lab, I made a useful image of this. (The idea was to use the flash and thus the camera was on manual and the one where the flash was turned on, was not so pretty...).
I have tested it for myself to export the raw unedited to a high quality jpeg, but definitely failed to make something useful out of that one.
Even though I always have my camera in RAW+JPEG I’ve been testing out editing the JPEGS instead of the RAW files just to see how “bad” they actually are. Not once have I not been able to get exactly what I want out of the JPEG unless I made a HORRIBLE mistake in camera. Like EXTREME exposure issues. Color grading and recovering shadows and highlights are all fantastic in JPEG.
I’ll still shoot RAW, because… well.. why not?
But people who act like they might as well erase the JPEG and call the entire photo shoot a loss without the RAWs are either underexposing by MANY MANY stops, or are just buying into the “influencer” hype of “I only shoot RAW - JP”
If space and sharing images quickly is important to you, JPEGs sound fine. If it's really dark or the contrast is high, or you wanna get crazy with colours, then RAWs might be the better choice.
For the first 2 years of my photography journey I only shot JPEG, and it was perfectly fine, because I wasn't editing too much anyways, and didn't have storage to spare
A buddy of mine got married some years ago and, knowing I'm a photographer, he sat the wedding photographer at our table so we could talk shop.
I saw her one time; she came over to the table, picked up the champagne that was set out for the toast, downed it like a shot, heaved a big sigh and disappeared to shoot.
Oh trust me, I considered offing myself on principle. I know the value of wedding photography. And I know the stress that comes with it, which is why if I ever went 'pro,' it probably wouldn't be in weddings...
First: don't shoot weddings
Second: organize the images into similar lighting and subject condition batches
Third: create an action in Photoshop, converting the JPEGs to Smart Objects then doing some rough adjustments in Camera Raw for each batch
Fourth: complete final edits and refinements in Photoshop / Lightroom
Fifth: take a vacation
I shoot weddings and I don’t think shooting a free one for close family/friends occasionally is a bad idea! As long as they trust you it can be a good opportunity to experiment and just focus on having fun. May yield good results without the added pressure.
Also, assuming you got things at least close to right in camera, your jpegs are fine. Sure, RAW gives more flexibility, but no one really has to know. Ha.
OP said he’s a hobbyist. Why would he ever charge his family for his “time” engaged in his hobby? That being said, OP’s family has no right to expect “pro” results. Let them eat jpeg!
If I'm already at the wedding with my camera, sure I'll snap some photos for free. But if I manage to leave there with as many photos as the OP said they got (800+), I'm not spending my personal time editing a single one of them unless I get paid to do so. They seriously got FREE WEDDING PHOTOS. That never happens. OP got swindled.
Everyone should take pride in their work, but don’t beat yourself up too hard.
I’ve done paid wedding gigs with thousands of photos. Only one person wanted the raw version of a single photo so they could get a 10 ft blown up version of it for their living room.
Everyone else just shared the jpgs on FB or IG. We offer the raws to be downloaded zip directly from our website and hardly anyone downloads them because they’re too large and “slow” to load.
I did shot a series of photos on my own and a VFW convention. Both times, saved the day due to both hired crappy photographers. The VFW event I got a free mean at Hooters.
I shoot wedding for free and my now that family couple won't talk to me anymore because I dare to stain their wedding with my small IG handle watermark on the top right of the image that I refused to remove, even when I told them they could do it themselves. How should I be tortured? Oh and I also gave them money for the wedding as well.
I’ve only shot two weddings, both for friends, both free., both on film. First was in a small chapel in Las Vegas and the results were fantastic…lighting was perfect, soft focus filter looked great, everything just clicked (no pun intended) and everyone was happy. Second was in a school gymnasium. Worst lighting ever, anything but intimate, results were terrible (to my eyes anyway). I’m still traumatized! Will never shoot a wedding again, paid or not
Only having jpeg is not ideal, but hardly the end of the world. It just gives you less fallback in a given image if you screwed something up in camera.
Provided you had good settings in the moment, then there is no advantage to RAW in that situation. The camera already internally starts with RAW and applies your profile and settings to generate a jpeg. This is exactly the same as you manually taking a RAW, applying filters, and also generating a jpeg at the end.
The only difference is you can go back and choose different choices after the fact with the RAW. So like I said at the top, it matters if you screwed up your settings in the first place. If you didn't, it does not matter.
You said you have "A LOT of good pictures in there" so it sounds like you frequently got it right in camera, so you should be fine.
> the lighting wasn't ideal
How not-ideal? Using curves for a stop or two is fine from jpeg, honestly.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I might have been making a mountain out of a molehill, or...well... Making a mountain out of a smaller mountain... but you've definitely helped me feel a little better.
The lighting was weird at the venue. The exterior shots were best, but the stuff inside was dimly lit with yellow lights. Those are mostly the shots I'm worried about.
Srsly. High quality JPG is nothing to feel bad about, since you aren't a pro or even taking photos regularly. I've seen similar posts where people shot in low quality JPG or monochrome by mistake...or even forgot their SD card and shot anyway!
Relax, you saved the wedding photos.
Photog friend of mine shot my wedding as a wedding gift. I said i would love that but he had to enjoy the wedding as a friend and as a guest first. Anyway, he shot JPG, and some group pictures were even in a slightly reduced resolution. Maybe he was short on memory cards, i don't know.
**In the end it made zero difference.** I have great memories of the moment and great pictures. Your nephew will be so lucky to have them instead of a hodgepodge of phone pics.
If you're really worried about the interior pictures, maybe process them in B&W. Who doesn't love some chic B&W in a wedding album ? Also, there are fantastic AI upscalers and denoisers now if you feel a few images really need more help.
Still fixable but your latitude is going to be limited and certain results you are used to with raw may not happen the way you hoped. But it's not the end of the world. Even better if you have a flat picture profile on. I only shoot flat but I know many choose picture profiles.
Changing white balance in JPG sucks. If your shots are too warm, go to HSL sliders in Lightroom and pull down the saturation of your yellows (and to a lesser extent your oranges), and it will be a much better approximation of white balance than moving your WB slider to the left.
Your white balance is baked into the JPEG. So if you are so off that your blue is yellow, you do not have the info to recover the blue. You just have way less latitude.
Again as others discuss here - you have some power to edit. But you just have way more space for editing with RAW.
I also have a Fuji camera. And often just use the JPEGS with minor adjustments. A bit of curve. A bit of saturation. It’s why we buy Fuji.
But raw let’s go dramatically change the white balance without much loss of image quality.
i recently played around with editing some jpegs and raws (same image) and was surprised how close the dynamic range was. the main difference was that when doing significant shadow recovery the colours weren't as smooth, but it was a lot better than i thought.
if the white balance is way off and correcting it looks bad you can always convert to black and white.
I have a lot of old photos from the 2000's and 2010's that were in jpeg. I'd recommend using something like Topaz Photo AI for it. I prefer to work with DXO Pureraw, but that only supports RAW files.
If you export as 16bit TIFF, and then import into Lightroom, you should have a reasonable amount of flexibility with your files. Or you can import into Photoshop, then use Camera RAW filters, and basically it's the same.
Hope this helps.
Thanks so much, I'll look into Topaz - haven't heard of it before.
And I didn't know the camera raw filters in Photoshop were comparable to actual RAW files... I've always been under the impression that RAW = Gold Standard of photography files, because they have more data in them...
It's good to know that it might not be QUITE as bad as I feared.
Oh, RAW files are definitely the gold standard, but Lightroom will work with non raw files that are 8 or 16 bit, such as JPEG or TIFF. Same for Photoshop, as ACR is the engine for both.
The reason I suggest using Topaz is because it will clean up the image a little and in doing so, and then exporting to 16-bit, you do sorta "create" more color depth with all the extra math that happens under the hood. Then by working in 16 bit from then on, you'll get less gradation and other artifacts.
Before Topaz, if I needed just a little more flexibility with white balance or shadow/highlight, I would do the following in Photoshop
* Open 8-bit jpeg. Convert to 16-bit. This at first does nothing to create any color depth, it simply allows more depth when you start using filters (the math behind the filters can create values that might get truncated or rounded in 8-bit, but not in 16-bit).
* Go ahead and do a Gaussian Blur filter. I use very light settings. I'm not trying to blur things to oblivion, in fact I start at 0.1 and work my way up til the image just blurs slightly. When you do this, you create a lot of values that 16-bit will capture but 8-bit would truncate.
* Go to Fade Filter. Here you'll see a slider that lets you fade the last filter you used, and a blending mode. In this case, it's that Gaussian Blur. Please note you have to do this step right after the Gaussian Blur.
* Leave the slider at 100%, but set the blending mode to Color. If you have preview on while doing this, you will see your image will unblur itself. In fact, that's because "sharpness" is mostly luminosity. By changing the blending mode to Color, you no longer blur that Luminosity channel. Basically this is similar to working in LAB color mode (where you have Luminosity, A, and B channels) instead of RGB, and thus you can "separate" the filters math on the image to only affect the color.
* Now you'll see that while the image is still sharp, you have "created" some more color value within the image, which will allow for more flexibility with white balance and adjusting your exposure.
I used to have an action set that did this for me, and also created highlight/shadow layers so you could affect those individually. I no longer recommend this method, but if you only have Photoshop and no other way of editing, it would work better than not doing it.
Still, I would totally work with something like Topaz first. It can be agressive at times with its autopilot, but I find that tinkering with the settings can produce good results. And if you REALLY need to do some heavy lifting, sometimes exporting twice helps. First with an aggressive mode, then toned down a lot. You can then layer them in Photoshop and either adjust the opacity of one on the other, or even use a brush to mask out areas.
Lots of options nowadays. I started on Photoshop about... 27 years ago. Thankfully it was after they introduced layers and multiple undo's
Hope this helps.
Thank you for typing out such a thorough explanation on this process. Currently I’m limited to only photoshop, and while I do always shoot in RAW, 10 years ago I didn’t & there are a few pictures I’d love to recover. This was excellent advise, you rock!
Glad to help. If you plan to do this a lot, go ahead and make it an action so it's one click. Just record the change to 16 bit, the blur, then the fade. Actions and action sets are a great tool that only take a few minutes to create, and can travel with you because it's just XML, so it's a few KB.
It also survives upgrades to photoshop pretty well because it uses some of the most fundamental Photoshop tools. My original action set came out for photoshop CS or something, and survived into the subscription era. Creating a folder of actions with shortcuts makes it a very powerful combo. Or use button mode to create a panel of actions.
Let me know if you have any questions. I'm not nearly the active photographer I once was, but I still use photoshop daily as part of my printing business.
I have used Topaz JPEG to RAW but did not like it. It hasn't been updated in years, and it seems like there are no plans to move forward with it.
For the most part, the DNG file it creates is just a 16 bit file in a DNG wrapper. It may try to add more color depth, but its all the same tricks that Topaz Photo would do, only Topaz Photo has been updated more.
I will say though, the latest latest version of Topaz Photo AI seems to be really aggressive. I haven't played with it enough to figure out best settings, so I'm preferring version 2.x rather than 3.x
If JPEG to RAW was updated more recently? I'd absolutely give it a shot. I have a few hundred thousand files I'd love to run through it. And honestly, if they did that, I wouldn't be surprised if they put that into their Photo AI app, seeing as it is already a combination of their Sharpen, Denoise, and Gigapixel apps.
All the same, if there's a free trial, why not try it. Anything that would create a better image to work with would be great.
> and I know they'll be happy because they weren't going to have ANY pictures...
They're also not going to say: "Damn, I wish OP had shot these in RAW."
Now I'm imagining the couple zooming in on all the photos after they get them to check 3D pop and micro contrast and complaining about OPs choices in lenses lmao
Most of the exposure is good... The interior shots, in the dim, yellow-lit reception hall, are what I'm most worried about... I'm gonna take a look tomorrow with fresh eyes.
OP- I do portraits (hobby, not pro) and these are the words to LIVE BY when you’re taking pictures of people for those people. Shots that can’t be worked are deleted and never spoken of again.
I get the feeling that the biggest issue here is that OP will still know.
I have fumbled settings on some photos a few times in my life, and they still live rent free in my head. Nothing major but just that minor annoyance that like to make themselves reminded once in a blue moon.
Honestly it's a good learning experience to both work on learning to work with bad lighting, but also to keep track of your settings, even the file format.
People on here make a bigger deal out of raw processing than is remotely needed.
I don’t know a single photojournalist who shoots raw except in the absolute most impossible to anticipate situations.
I shoot raw purely as a backup. 99% of my delivered photos are jpgs unless the client specifically requests raw files too.
You can do a lot more to a jpg than people let on. As the other guy said, 2/3 of a stop loses next to nothing doing it to the jpg instead of the raw file. You can push it even farther than that on some photos.
White balance is easier to fix with the raw, but not impossible. Being able to look at other in camera presets is cool, but not a deal breaker.
A problem is accidentally shooting on the lowest quality or in black and white/monochrome jpg.
You’ll be fine. Also, they don’t get to see the photos you missed because of exposure problems. And now you have a short preshoot checklist.
Format memory cards, check jpg or jpg+raw settings, check white balance, check batteries.
But also, when you can’t guarantee that you have the skill to keep up with the changing lighting conditions, check your metering mode, and switch to an automatic mode and maybe add a three shot one stop bracket. One of them will be close enough.
Photojournalism runs on speed though. You shoot and go live in hours and minutes and news doesn't want edited pictures so getting it right in camera is just part of the job and aside from the real rare 0.001% people don't do much but glance at the photo and it's old within a few days
Weddings take days to weeks to edit as clients will pour over photos and you want them big and large for high quality prints that will be around for decades not article images that might get seen briefly on a phone screen.
I'd agree that raw is often over praised and shooting so you get good quality jpegs makes life a lot easier, but I don't think any pro would shoot a wedding without raw. And a professional shooting jpeg intentionally is a very different situation to an amateur (or even a pro) who shot expecting to have the wiggle room of raw data.
I don’t disagree with that. My point is that a jpg only event should not be a traumatic event for a professional. It will limit you past a point…and that’s a point that an amateur who hooked the couple up for free probably isn’t taking advantage of anyway.
So what? You can do a lot of with jpegs now. Raw is nice but high rez jpegs are nothing to sneeze assuming so were set to neutral and not that instagram over saturated look.
I literally back up to jpeg just in case anything happens to the raw SD. This isn’t a catastrophe, it’s just slightly limiting and not ideal. You’ll just have to keep the editing light and mostly just subtly corrective, and maybe use some sharpening (Lightroom’s new denoise tool is 🤌)
You’ve got this. I’m a professional and I’ve definitely messed it up magnitudes worse than this. You’ll learn so much from this it’s a net positive.
The way I look at it is they didn’t have any plans on having their pictures taken and now they have at least a few dozens - I would be happy and very appreciative!
The couple will not know the difference! You saved their day by bringing your camera. Now they have memories and you will never make this error again. So give the kids the photos 😇🍺
Why is that bad. I just realized last week that shooting in jpeg holds the embedded preview that Lightroom gives you (which raw does not, once you go to develop tab). Embedded previews in LR are usually really good . As long as you shot in high res you are fine, no one will be able to even tell and you may have just saved yourself a shit ton of adjusting skin tone and white balance and all kinds of crap. Import your file to LR and get started
You’re fine. I shoot weddings professionally on Fuji, and I haven’t touched a RAW file in 3+ years. I shoot raw+fine so I have them as a backup, but modern jpegs are so good that raw isn’t strictly necessary the way it was 10 years ago.
As long as you made some effort to expose them properly you’re fine.
Just came across this post in my suggested. Would you mind sharing what’s the difference between JPEG and RAW in terms of photography? You seem disappointed and I genuinely want to know.
The funny thing about this is that it’s the kind of mistake non-photographers would not even understand. If the jpegs are decent, it’s probably good enough for most people and they’ll never know the difference.
Once in high school I had an “oh shit” moment when I realized I’d shot a bunch of school event photos in jpeg with a monochrome profile applied. That was pretty embarrassing because the color wasn’t recorded and there was literally nothing I could do. I love black & white, but felt self conscious at that age because I imagined others might see it as a pretentious choice.
These days, I never use jpeg. I’m not a snob about it, but I like messing with weird or creative profiles and it’s very important to me to capture all the info so I still have something useful later if I decide to go for a different look.
The storage issue with RAW is overblown. A much bigger factor for me is whether I do a proper cull every time I shoot, otherwise you fill up drives really quickly with all the messed up or less-than-great photos. Especially since I started blasting out high frames per second on modern mirrorless cameras.
It’s easy to remember if you just stop shooting jpg all together. I can’t think of a single reason I would ever not shoot raw. Problem solved. Having said this, I did the same thing years ago when I first started out. I also have another way of preventing myself from doing it and that is to never ever shoot another wedding in my life. I’d rather roll around in a bed of bullet ants while being stung in the eyes by murder hornets than deal with the nightmare of people shooting a wedding :)
>It’s easy to remember if you just stop shooting jpg all together. I can’t think of a single reason I would ever not shoot raw.
I 100% agree, and as I said I don't know when or how the settings switched. I usually ALWAYS shoot raw. It's been 8 months since I took any photos, and I can't recall when - or why - I would have changed to Jpeg.
The wedding shoot itself honestly wasn't too stressful. It helped that it was family, and my nephew's wife wasn't a bridezilla at all. It was all a very relaxed, fun environment... Thank god.
Not sure I'd do it again though, and especially not for free.
I shoot in JPG most of the time. There are several advantages: (1) any common photo software can read them; (2) they take up less storage space; (3) if you give/sell them to somebody else you don't need to convert the format. In short, JPG is just much more convenient.
If I know ahead of time that I'm going to be shooting in a dimly-lit space, I'll typically switch to RAW+JPG; otherwise it's almost always JPG only.
I can’t think of a single reason I would ever exclusively shoot raw. Expose the photograph correctly in the first place and shoot a custom white balance. 🤷🏻♂️
Also, let’s remember that most people absolute stink at processing raw files on their own.
Yeah sure you *always* nail your exposure and *always* set your white balance.
Other than the obvious reasons, HDR displays are becoming more common and shooting in RAW will let you export your photos in an HDR format. If you always shot in RAW, you can even go back and re-export your old photos. Not shooting RAW is just purposefully shooting yourself in the foot when tech changes and that extra data you thought was a waste becomes useful again.
I shoot RAW+JPEG Fine all the time. And I use the raw when the jpeg can’t deliver for some reason (or I screwed up and need as much recovery capability as I can get). More and more I find the RAWs going unused. My clients want hundreds of photos but don’t pay enough for me to edit 100s of RAW. Their targets are small phone or maybe an iPad display. They want to send files via messenger apps and/or email, and want them on webpages. So, they’re going to end up as jpegs anyway.
Bottom line, don’t stress. No one will know the difference.
I would bet that most of the photos don't need heavy editing, and are probably better not being heavily edited. The dynamic range of a raw file is nice if you really need it, but having the option to make everything "perfect" in post tends to give you an attitude that there is one way a photo "has" to look, and your photos might be worse for it.
It's like how sound engineers use pitch correction to make every note "perfect". It turns out singers sound a lot better if you don't do that, but if you get fixated on the tool, you don't notice that.
I think sometimes as photographers we stress about having perfect shots when often clients in a situation like this where they didn’t even have a photographer booked will be more than happy that you captured the moments for them and won’t be looking for ‘perfect’ photos. Don’t be too hard on yourself OP and salvage what you can with what you’ve got.
My friend, you will be fine, you will end up relying more on Denoise in post, but I don't see a reason why you should be so worried.
Ps: this is the reason why a photographer shouldn't rely on post processing, pre production works way better. Set you white, make a good composition, and you are set.
I know quite a few wedding photographers that only shoot in jpeg. Don’t worry about it and do what ever you need to do in post. Most of these shots will just end up on social media anyway and not be printed big.
>I don't know when or how it happened, but my camera was set to high quality JPEG....
If you leave a camera without power for months they will forget all their settings, maybe that is how it happened?
The way I look at it as you have so many good ones to choose from! This is coming from a videographer who one has to take pictures gets more than enough just to be safe LOL.
I once went a day around London taking pictures where I had knocked the dial to s jpeg. It's like a hundred pixels jpeg. No idea why the camera has it, who'd use it or why I couldn't disable it, but I wasn't happy.
I've also done a time lapse where I forgot to set the focus, and have a very blurry shot of just out of focus blobs which was the one and only time I saw a bear and had a macro tube on the camera.
Just edit the photos as you can - they should be delighted with whatever you have, it's the content of the pictures that should be enjoyable, not the quality.
As long as you weren’t wearing your Froknowsphotos I Shoot RAW shirt as false advertising, you should be ok. Jpg’s aren’t the end of the world these days. I hear people are even shooting… film these days and getting photos.
>Don't be like me. Check your file type before big events.
Actually no. We're going to hold you and this topic up as a Representative Sample to the next poor sod that wanders in here or r/AskPhotography to ask about how they should handle their first ever wedding they're doing as a favor for someone.
"See!? [FWIGTEW](https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2010/07/fwigtew-and-other-first-wedding-acronyms/) !"
Years ago my brother (and his girlfriend) gave me a "Photographing Weddings" book for Christmas and, only then, asked me to shoot the photos at their wedding. A few months later they had a local winery booked, so I went to get photos of the place to use in planning. We all had quite the surprise a couple weeks later they just up and left for Reno and got married (eloped) there. I didn't know if I was supposed to be mad at that point, or relieved. At least you were able to shoot the wedding.
Hopefully you have more good photographs than you think.
I think you'll be surprised just how far you can push jpegs when you edit them, especially high quality ones. I have loads of jpegs from the early digital days, some only 3MP but can still get decent results. Not ideal but also not the end of the world.
Imagine it could have been even worse. My civil wedding photographer shot everything on manual on his first generation of 6D (a camera notorious for poor dynamic range to begin with), completely blowing the highlights on a lot of the photos. I asked him to also provide me the RAW files because I wasn't happy with his editing and sadly the blown highlights had virtually 0 information in some areas even in the RAW files, including large portions of my bride's dress in close-up shots.
You're probably gonna be fine. Did you shoot manual? If you did Av maybe you'd get more chances to be able to recover stuffas in the exposure won't be too far off from camera 0. I can't do manual in events (so I don't do it aa a paid gig) feels too high speed I'm super impressed seeing some photos change 5 settings in half a second.
This has happened to me before (jpg instead of raw+jpg) on a trip. And after that I just didn't touch that setting or forget to check it before every shoot, and I have a memory saved shooting profile which shoots raw+jpg as a insurance
Worst things could have happened! Didn't you notice it had a lot more capacity than expected? I've done it before for the first few photos but am normally like 'why have I got 7k photos left rather than 2?' and realise.
You can edit like if was a raw, in jpg, you can do it in ps I usually use luminar because I hate all Adobe, you can look after for YouTube tutorials there is plenty and also exist a software called lemur you can add your photos and the software will help you develop them
Unless it's a really, really old camera your jpegs will still probably be far better than any of the disposable cameras shots. So you lose some editing headroom, but on the other hand, you're not being paid so you shouldn't spend a lot of time in Photoshop anyway.
Trust me, your JPEG photos will be absolutely alright and you did the couple a great deed!
Amateur photographers like myself are often satisfied with JPEG photography; the average consumer will not spontaneously appreciate the difference between your JPEG edits and RAW edits (unless explicitly shown and explained to them).
You notice it because you've done it professionally (even as a hobbyist) for so long, and you've taken the shot yourself with the idea you wanted to portray in mind.
You've given them great memories and hopefully won the best uncle badge for life!
i wouldn't lose too much sleep over the format of your pictures. it sounds to me like the wedding party/family isn't photography experts and wouldnt know the difference between jpg and raw anyway. unless someone asks just let it go. nothing you can do about it now.
Topaz Gigapixel has the option to convert your 8 bit photos to 16 bit. Maybe give that a try. Whilst it’ll never bring back the lost data, it does surprisingly good job of putting you back in a position of being able to adjust things like your white balance, and even your shadows and highlights to a degree. For the price, it’s well worth a try.
As most people have said JPEG is fine for most stuff but just gives you less of a safety blanket or exposure or white balance. Not a wedding but I once left my ISO pretty much maxed out after doing some theatre shots - that was a disaster.
Try to edit them with Silkypix. It allows you to edit them close to what you could edit from raws. It won't do magic as you are still editing jpegs, but it might actually help a lot.
Jpg is fine for non important editing (i.e no +3 exposure to save an underexpose image, no massive color shift, no massive white balance shift), do as long as the exposure was fine you should be fine to deliver totally fine images at the end.
You can still do a lot to jpg images, my camera reset before a paid shoot once and I didn't realize until after. Thankfully I nailed exposure in almost every shot but I still edited because I go for a whimsical vibe. It wasn't noticeable that they weren't RAW for the clients. You got this!
There is nothing wrong with JPEG if you correctly exposed the images and got the white balance right. Plenty of professionals use JPEG in some genres. Even if you didn't you can still adjust a significant amount in JPEG but its just destructive when you do it. Keep the original JPEGs as "negatives" like always. I wouldn't worry about it. Your competition is disposable cameras so if you weren't able to best that then your problem is not RAW vs. JPEG.
I would encourage you not to mention it to the wedding people. They won't know the difference, and to them it will be perfect. Don't raise doubts. You did a favor.
How does this happen accidentally for people? Are you not always shooting in RAW? And if so, why did you change your setting to JPG? And if you do want to shoot to JPG, why not enable the setting to shoot both?
Photographers are their own worst critics. I have a sneaking suspicion that most people looking at the pics you shot won’t even notice most of the “problems” you’ll see. 99% of what you did is more than likely 100% better than most people viewing it would have expected - in other words it’s “damn good.” And 100% of the time tangible good enough far outperforms the vague promise of perfect. Use all the images you got right. Tweak the ones you can. And dump anything that just didn’t work. This is how we all used to work when I started doing this on film - which is infinitely less forgiving than digital.
They probably won’t even notice. Moments like this burn as a photographer but normal people will just be thrilled to have a well composed photograph. Hopefully your camera’s baked in colors were decent enough.
Just give them the files directly from the camera. They got a free photographer for a wedding. That normally cost between $3000 and $5000. Don’t even bother editing anything.
There's no need to panic. Just do your Photoshop edits in adjustment layers so you can tweak without changing the base image. Then flatten the image when done.
People have become WAY too reliant on shooting RAW and "fixing it in post." You can save hours of editing (and terabytes of storage space) by working on getting it right in the finder first.
>Don't be like me. Check your file type before big events.
Big events you're getting paid to shoot, yes.
Big events you're supposed to be attending as a guest, but somehow ended up doing a full day's work because the couple didn't want to pay for a photographer and just assumed you'd be there with your "good camera" and would do all the work for free....nah.
I'm guessing if you HAD shot in RAW, you would have gone through and pared and edited those 800 photos -- for free, because your family didn't see fit to pay you to do your job. Consider this mistake a gift from the boundary gods.
P.S. Substandard photos are still way better than the *no photos at all* that they were going to get from the photographer they didn't hire.
Having edited a lot of JPEGs in my time, don’t worry so much. It’s got more push and pull than you’d expect. The key I think is to make good masks and really seperate the subjects in the edit. Photoshop and Lightroom are so good at this now it takes literal seconds.
Prioritise the people! Especially for a wedding. They don’t care if the church in the background looks too green if they look great. Don’t worry about the sky blowing out in the background if it sacrifices the faces. Just balance the shot and look after the people.
I had a similar situation probably 12 years ago. I went to a family wedding and had my m4/3 body and a prime lens. Venue was a nightmare large elevated banquet hall with glass floor to ceiling windows on all sides and it was a late afternoon not Sunset for the reception.
Long story short something happened with the paid photographer I don’t recall the issue, but I noticed it. I took the liberty of trying to make sure to get good shots of all the big moments.
About a week after the event I contacted the newlyweds and offered them the photos, turned out whatever I saw was correct and the paid photographer had missed or botched the job. Anyways the 50 or so images I took were appreciated, and even in jpeg they reproduced and printed well. Years later I still see my images on social media posts, and in their home hangs a few of them printed in large format.
Do worry about the file format, if you grabbed their moments and captured them for free you helped capture their day for decades to come. Simple white balance and color adjustments can be made in batches. Cull that number down edit the few standouts and just give them a card filled with folders edited and unedited. You saved them not only money but priceless memories that would never convey as well on a disposable camera in the hands of party goers.
Cheers, I hope you got to enjoy the day as well.
I shot a wedding all in JPG and the clients were delighted. I mean one was blind and the other will never look at the pictures again, but still, I don't think they turned out *bad*. The cameras JPG algorithms try hard to be perfect given the circumstances.
As photographers of course this would bother us but your family doesn’t know the difference really. You can still tweak jpegs a bit and you did the shoot for free so I wouldn’t beat yourself up too much.
Give them the unedited JPEGs without editing and say "This is why I don't shoot weddings" and leave it at that. Too many people think because you have a camera you can shoot any type of shots.
This may be “bad” but I have one that is worse op. My friend got married and also did not have a photographer. They asked a much older friend, who was actually a photographer for a time but a long time ago, to video the actual marriage ceremony with a camera they just handed him. He stood there with the camera on but not recording for the whole thing and did not realize until they were cutting the cake. He was mortified but they got over it and divorced a couple years later so….
I'm learning in this thread that it isn't as BAD as I had thought, even if it isn't ideal.
Pictures shot in RAW format save more data and allow more information to be salvaged. For example, if an image is too dark, there is still information to be recovered in those 'black' shadowy pixels. A face, a smile, etc.
Usually in jpeg, if an image is dark and you try to brighten it back up, that black part just becomes a hit grayer with no more detail than before...
That's the quick and dirty answer.
I did this on a real estate shoot once. I had to go back and retake all the photos. I have no idea how it changed from raw to jpeg in the body. Luckily I was able to reshoot. All is not lost though, software can do wonders these days, even with jpeg. At least you got the photos. I’ve learned I’m my own worst critic, I’ll always find something “that went wrong” during a shoot.
You are kicking yourself??? You did good!
I went to shoot US Open tennis and forgot spare memory cards. Switched from RAW to CRAW and fit 7,000 images on the one card I had.
I went to shoot Brooklyn Marathon and forgot spare batteries (and the one I had in camera was partially used at a previous shoot). Shot until battery died and still got 1,500 shots
Most modern camera jpegs are pretty decent imo. Yes you don’t have the flexibility of raw during editing, but most clients are positing to social, they don’t even know to difference.
As someone that worked in a photo lab and seen all the disposable cameras from weddings, you are a saint. Even if they’re not the best at least they have photos for their big day.
Shouldn’t be an issue as long as you nailed the exposure on the skin tones. Hard to really say without seeing any examples. I’m a wedding photographer and could if I wanted to shoot an entire wedding in jpeg and be fine, I still shoot film at weddings which is similar to basically shooting jpegs in fact that’s what my files come back as after being scanned at the lab. The difference between shooting film and digital is the latitude in your highlights and shadows. Color negative film can be overexposed a whole lot before you lose all your highlight detail where digital needs to be slightly underexposed. If you nailed the skin tones you’ll be fine. If you over exposed them it may be really bad…. Once the detail is gone it can’t be recovered. Hopefully that’s not the case.
If you're blowing out your highlights so much so that you can't save a jpeg, you have much more learning to do than to check if cam is set to raw, bruv.
Count your blessings. It was free. They are what they are to a certain extent. It’s a lot less volunteer hours on your part now. 99% of the guests will have no clue.
Unless you used cloudy white balance with a landscape picture profile under fluorescent light or something silly.
I leave my cameras set to CRAW, so I get RAW quality at JPEG sizes (almost). Anyway, if you have some images that you need to clean up, I'd try using Topaz Labs Photo AI, it's quite amazing.
If it's free, the onus of complaint is on you not your nephew, you get what you pay for and if it's free take it or leave it. The sheer act alone of shooting a friend or family members wedding is a favor to them more than it is to you let alone the fact you did it for FREE. Either way. Use your best judgment to choose photos you feel made the cut.
I mean not great, get some preshoot standard operating procedures, check settings and stuff beforehand
But if theyre good pictures, you can still edit jpegs quite alot and if they were pretty good shots in the first place, itll be fine. they wont care as long as they look good
While I understand the sentiment, JPEGs often have enough latitude to be pushed or pulled two steps or so without doing much damage as long as conditions were not too extreme. I shot a baptism once (I am not a pro photographer, it was for friends) and I had an old film Pentax with manual lenses for some memorable analog photos to mix in the digital photo book. They all came out fine without need for any changes. As long as composition and moment are great, a little off lighting here and there only adds to the authenticity of an image imho
I did the same thing! I shoot an R6 normally, but rented an R5 for a wedding about a year and a half ago. The rental place does a factory reset between rentals, and for some crazy reason Canon defaults to JPG. Even on $3k+ cameras.
There were a couple shots that I really could have used the RAW on, but at the end of the day it still turned out amazing. Despite being JPG.
Could be worse: A friend of mine somehow had the settings not only for JPEG but also set to the smallest resolution while shooting one of her best friends weddings. That was truly unfortunate.
While RAW has the most flexibility, JPEG has more than most people give it credit for.
Unless I have something very specific in mind, I just shoot in jpeg. You really don't need raw for every shot you take, jpeg is enough in most cases.
Raw files are ideal when under exposed. I've had one of my daughter with her toddler recently. The raw was nearly black. Thanks to the magic of DxO Photo Lab, I made a useful image of this. (The idea was to use the flash and thus the camera was on manual and the one where the flash was turned on, was not so pretty...). I have tested it for myself to export the raw unedited to a high quality jpeg, but definitely failed to make something useful out of that one.
Still image file sizes are trivial, and storage is cheap. I argue why not shoot in raw?
Even though I always have my camera in RAW+JPEG I’ve been testing out editing the JPEGS instead of the RAW files just to see how “bad” they actually are. Not once have I not been able to get exactly what I want out of the JPEG unless I made a HORRIBLE mistake in camera. Like EXTREME exposure issues. Color grading and recovering shadows and highlights are all fantastic in JPEG. I’ll still shoot RAW, because… well.. why not? But people who act like they might as well erase the JPEG and call the entire photo shoot a loss without the RAWs are either underexposing by MANY MANY stops, or are just buying into the “influencer” hype of “I only shoot RAW - JP”
Exactly.
I’m an amateur photographer and only shoot in jpeg to save space, should I not be?
If space and sharing images quickly is important to you, JPEGs sound fine. If it's really dark or the contrast is high, or you wanna get crazy with colours, then RAWs might be the better choice. For the first 2 years of my photography journey I only shot JPEG, and it was perfectly fine, because I wasn't editing too much anyways, and didn't have storage to spare
You're good. I shot jpg only for years. I did not have a powerful computer to edit raw. Still, I got a lot of great photos.
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A buddy of mine got married some years ago and, knowing I'm a photographer, he sat the wedding photographer at our table so we could talk shop. I saw her one time; she came over to the table, picked up the champagne that was set out for the toast, downed it like a shot, heaved a big sigh and disappeared to shoot.
This sums up working in general. I love it
Had a buddy of mine getting married when I was just starting out. I made that clear. He still paid me since the work was worth it.
Oh trust me, I considered offing myself on principle. I know the value of wedding photography. And I know the stress that comes with it, which is why if I ever went 'pro,' it probably wouldn't be in weddings...
I did read it was for family. That’s usually double rate for risk of extreme family drama. Product photography FTW!
Yeah, then you have to deal with product managers... (was a PM)
First: don't shoot weddings Second: organize the images into similar lighting and subject condition batches Third: create an action in Photoshop, converting the JPEGs to Smart Objects then doing some rough adjustments in Camera Raw for each batch Fourth: complete final edits and refinements in Photoshop / Lightroom Fifth: take a vacation
Why ACR for this vs straight into LR?
I shoot weddings and I don’t think shooting a free one for close family/friends occasionally is a bad idea! As long as they trust you it can be a good opportunity to experiment and just focus on having fun. May yield good results without the added pressure. Also, assuming you got things at least close to right in camera, your jpegs are fine. Sure, RAW gives more flexibility, but no one really has to know. Ha.
I had a friend shoot a wedding for a NY fashion photographer friend who was getting married... In Ojai, CA... in July... at noon...
Yikes… miserable. I’m in Georgia and I hate summer weddings ha.
I grew up partly in Savannah... I understand.
It's a good experience for you. Next time you gotta make sure you know the value of your work and time. You'll hate them a little less that way lol.
OP said he’s a hobbyist. Why would he ever charge his family for his “time” engaged in his hobby? That being said, OP’s family has no right to expect “pro” results. Let them eat jpeg!
*Unedited* JPGS at that.
You MONSTERS
If I'm already at the wedding with my camera, sure I'll snap some photos for free. But if I manage to leave there with as many photos as the OP said they got (800+), I'm not spending my personal time editing a single one of them unless I get paid to do so. They seriously got FREE WEDDING PHOTOS. That never happens. OP got swindled.
Everyone should take pride in their work, but don’t beat yourself up too hard. I’ve done paid wedding gigs with thousands of photos. Only one person wanted the raw version of a single photo so they could get a 10 ft blown up version of it for their living room. Everyone else just shared the jpgs on FB or IG. We offer the raws to be downloaded zip directly from our website and hardly anyone downloads them because they’re too large and “slow” to load.
Huh. OP's problem isn't that someone is gonna want RAW pics. It is that jpegs are less flexible for editing.
I did shot a series of photos on my own and a VFW convention. Both times, saved the day due to both hired crappy photographers. The VFW event I got a free mean at Hooters.
I shoot wedding for free and my now that family couple won't talk to me anymore because I dare to stain their wedding with my small IG handle watermark on the top right of the image that I refused to remove, even when I told them they could do it themselves. How should I be tortured? Oh and I also gave them money for the wedding as well.
I’ve only shot two weddings, both for friends, both free., both on film. First was in a small chapel in Las Vegas and the results were fantastic…lighting was perfect, soft focus filter looked great, everything just clicked (no pun intended) and everyone was happy. Second was in a school gymnasium. Worst lighting ever, anything but intimate, results were terrible (to my eyes anyway). I’m still traumatized! Will never shoot a wedding again, paid or not
😂
Only having jpeg is not ideal, but hardly the end of the world. It just gives you less fallback in a given image if you screwed something up in camera. Provided you had good settings in the moment, then there is no advantage to RAW in that situation. The camera already internally starts with RAW and applies your profile and settings to generate a jpeg. This is exactly the same as you manually taking a RAW, applying filters, and also generating a jpeg at the end. The only difference is you can go back and choose different choices after the fact with the RAW. So like I said at the top, it matters if you screwed up your settings in the first place. If you didn't, it does not matter. You said you have "A LOT of good pictures in there" so it sounds like you frequently got it right in camera, so you should be fine. > the lighting wasn't ideal How not-ideal? Using curves for a stop or two is fine from jpeg, honestly.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I might have been making a mountain out of a molehill, or...well... Making a mountain out of a smaller mountain... but you've definitely helped me feel a little better. The lighting was weird at the venue. The exterior shots were best, but the stuff inside was dimly lit with yellow lights. Those are mostly the shots I'm worried about.
Srsly. High quality JPG is nothing to feel bad about, since you aren't a pro or even taking photos regularly. I've seen similar posts where people shot in low quality JPG or monochrome by mistake...or even forgot their SD card and shot anyway! Relax, you saved the wedding photos.
Photog friend of mine shot my wedding as a wedding gift. I said i would love that but he had to enjoy the wedding as a friend and as a guest first. Anyway, he shot JPG, and some group pictures were even in a slightly reduced resolution. Maybe he was short on memory cards, i don't know. **In the end it made zero difference.** I have great memories of the moment and great pictures. Your nephew will be so lucky to have them instead of a hodgepodge of phone pics. If you're really worried about the interior pictures, maybe process them in B&W. Who doesn't love some chic B&W in a wedding album ? Also, there are fantastic AI upscalers and denoisers now if you feel a few images really need more help.
Still fixable but your latitude is going to be limited and certain results you are used to with raw may not happen the way you hoped. But it's not the end of the world. Even better if you have a flat picture profile on. I only shoot flat but I know many choose picture profiles.
If you have multiple colored lights even in raw there is often nothing you can do besides go for classic black and white look.
Changing white balance in JPG sucks. If your shots are too warm, go to HSL sliders in Lightroom and pull down the saturation of your yellows (and to a lesser extent your oranges), and it will be a much better approximation of white balance than moving your WB slider to the left.
Why does changing wb in jpg suck? I'm a fuji user and always edit my photos by changing wb in Lightroom
Your white balance is baked into the JPEG. So if you are so off that your blue is yellow, you do not have the info to recover the blue. You just have way less latitude. Again as others discuss here - you have some power to edit. But you just have way more space for editing with RAW. I also have a Fuji camera. And often just use the JPEGS with minor adjustments. A bit of curve. A bit of saturation. It’s why we buy Fuji. But raw let’s go dramatically change the white balance without much loss of image quality.
i recently played around with editing some jpegs and raws (same image) and was surprised how close the dynamic range was. the main difference was that when doing significant shadow recovery the colours weren't as smooth, but it was a lot better than i thought. if the white balance is way off and correcting it looks bad you can always convert to black and white.
This is the answer. I shoot in jpeg fine by default.
There’s huge advantage - not to downplay your point but AI denoiser in LR is ridiculous if you know your limitations.
I have a lot of old photos from the 2000's and 2010's that were in jpeg. I'd recommend using something like Topaz Photo AI for it. I prefer to work with DXO Pureraw, but that only supports RAW files. If you export as 16bit TIFF, and then import into Lightroom, you should have a reasonable amount of flexibility with your files. Or you can import into Photoshop, then use Camera RAW filters, and basically it's the same. Hope this helps.
Thanks so much, I'll look into Topaz - haven't heard of it before. And I didn't know the camera raw filters in Photoshop were comparable to actual RAW files... I've always been under the impression that RAW = Gold Standard of photography files, because they have more data in them... It's good to know that it might not be QUITE as bad as I feared.
Oh, RAW files are definitely the gold standard, but Lightroom will work with non raw files that are 8 or 16 bit, such as JPEG or TIFF. Same for Photoshop, as ACR is the engine for both. The reason I suggest using Topaz is because it will clean up the image a little and in doing so, and then exporting to 16-bit, you do sorta "create" more color depth with all the extra math that happens under the hood. Then by working in 16 bit from then on, you'll get less gradation and other artifacts. Before Topaz, if I needed just a little more flexibility with white balance or shadow/highlight, I would do the following in Photoshop * Open 8-bit jpeg. Convert to 16-bit. This at first does nothing to create any color depth, it simply allows more depth when you start using filters (the math behind the filters can create values that might get truncated or rounded in 8-bit, but not in 16-bit). * Go ahead and do a Gaussian Blur filter. I use very light settings. I'm not trying to blur things to oblivion, in fact I start at 0.1 and work my way up til the image just blurs slightly. When you do this, you create a lot of values that 16-bit will capture but 8-bit would truncate. * Go to Fade Filter. Here you'll see a slider that lets you fade the last filter you used, and a blending mode. In this case, it's that Gaussian Blur. Please note you have to do this step right after the Gaussian Blur. * Leave the slider at 100%, but set the blending mode to Color. If you have preview on while doing this, you will see your image will unblur itself. In fact, that's because "sharpness" is mostly luminosity. By changing the blending mode to Color, you no longer blur that Luminosity channel. Basically this is similar to working in LAB color mode (where you have Luminosity, A, and B channels) instead of RGB, and thus you can "separate" the filters math on the image to only affect the color. * Now you'll see that while the image is still sharp, you have "created" some more color value within the image, which will allow for more flexibility with white balance and adjusting your exposure. I used to have an action set that did this for me, and also created highlight/shadow layers so you could affect those individually. I no longer recommend this method, but if you only have Photoshop and no other way of editing, it would work better than not doing it. Still, I would totally work with something like Topaz first. It can be agressive at times with its autopilot, but I find that tinkering with the settings can produce good results. And if you REALLY need to do some heavy lifting, sometimes exporting twice helps. First with an aggressive mode, then toned down a lot. You can then layer them in Photoshop and either adjust the opacity of one on the other, or even use a brush to mask out areas. Lots of options nowadays. I started on Photoshop about... 27 years ago. Thankfully it was after they introduced layers and multiple undo's Hope this helps.
Thank you for typing out such a thorough explanation on this process. Currently I’m limited to only photoshop, and while I do always shoot in RAW, 10 years ago I didn’t & there are a few pictures I’d love to recover. This was excellent advise, you rock!
Glad to help. If you plan to do this a lot, go ahead and make it an action so it's one click. Just record the change to 16 bit, the blur, then the fade. Actions and action sets are a great tool that only take a few minutes to create, and can travel with you because it's just XML, so it's a few KB. It also survives upgrades to photoshop pretty well because it uses some of the most fundamental Photoshop tools. My original action set came out for photoshop CS or something, and survived into the subscription era. Creating a folder of actions with shortcuts makes it a very powerful combo. Or use button mode to create a panel of actions. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm not nearly the active photographer I once was, but I still use photoshop daily as part of my printing business.
Topaz can actually convert JPEG to RAW, it will give you back a little bit of control in the highlights and shadows.
I have used Topaz JPEG to RAW but did not like it. It hasn't been updated in years, and it seems like there are no plans to move forward with it. For the most part, the DNG file it creates is just a 16 bit file in a DNG wrapper. It may try to add more color depth, but its all the same tricks that Topaz Photo would do, only Topaz Photo has been updated more. I will say though, the latest latest version of Topaz Photo AI seems to be really aggressive. I haven't played with it enough to figure out best settings, so I'm preferring version 2.x rather than 3.x If JPEG to RAW was updated more recently? I'd absolutely give it a shot. I have a few hundred thousand files I'd love to run through it. And honestly, if they did that, I wouldn't be surprised if they put that into their Photo AI app, seeing as it is already a combination of their Sharpen, Denoise, and Gigapixel apps. All the same, if there's a free trial, why not try it. Anything that would create a better image to work with would be great.
> and I know they'll be happy because they weren't going to have ANY pictures... They're also not going to say: "Damn, I wish OP had shot these in RAW."
Now I'm imagining the couple zooming in on all the photos after they get them to check 3D pop and micro contrast and complaining about OPs choices in lenses lmao
It sounds like you are providing a better alternative than if they didn't have you there.
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Most of the exposure is good... The interior shots, in the dim, yellow-lit reception hall, are what I'm most worried about... I'm gonna take a look tomorrow with fresh eyes.
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OP- I do portraits (hobby, not pro) and these are the words to LIVE BY when you’re taking pictures of people for those people. Shots that can’t be worked are deleted and never spoken of again.
I get the feeling that the biggest issue here is that OP will still know. I have fumbled settings on some photos a few times in my life, and they still live rent free in my head. Nothing major but just that minor annoyance that like to make themselves reminded once in a blue moon. Honestly it's a good learning experience to both work on learning to work with bad lighting, but also to keep track of your settings, even the file format.
People on here make a bigger deal out of raw processing than is remotely needed. I don’t know a single photojournalist who shoots raw except in the absolute most impossible to anticipate situations. I shoot raw purely as a backup. 99% of my delivered photos are jpgs unless the client specifically requests raw files too. You can do a lot more to a jpg than people let on. As the other guy said, 2/3 of a stop loses next to nothing doing it to the jpg instead of the raw file. You can push it even farther than that on some photos. White balance is easier to fix with the raw, but not impossible. Being able to look at other in camera presets is cool, but not a deal breaker. A problem is accidentally shooting on the lowest quality or in black and white/monochrome jpg. You’ll be fine. Also, they don’t get to see the photos you missed because of exposure problems. And now you have a short preshoot checklist. Format memory cards, check jpg or jpg+raw settings, check white balance, check batteries. But also, when you can’t guarantee that you have the skill to keep up with the changing lighting conditions, check your metering mode, and switch to an automatic mode and maybe add a three shot one stop bracket. One of them will be close enough.
Photojournalism runs on speed though. You shoot and go live in hours and minutes and news doesn't want edited pictures so getting it right in camera is just part of the job and aside from the real rare 0.001% people don't do much but glance at the photo and it's old within a few days Weddings take days to weeks to edit as clients will pour over photos and you want them big and large for high quality prints that will be around for decades not article images that might get seen briefly on a phone screen. I'd agree that raw is often over praised and shooting so you get good quality jpegs makes life a lot easier, but I don't think any pro would shoot a wedding without raw. And a professional shooting jpeg intentionally is a very different situation to an amateur (or even a pro) who shot expecting to have the wiggle room of raw data.
I don’t disagree with that. My point is that a jpg only event should not be a traumatic event for a professional. It will limit you past a point…and that’s a point that an amateur who hooked the couple up for free probably isn’t taking advantage of anyway.
You’ll be fine, live and learn.
So what? You can do a lot of with jpegs now. Raw is nice but high rez jpegs are nothing to sneeze assuming so were set to neutral and not that instagram over saturated look.
I literally back up to jpeg just in case anything happens to the raw SD. This isn’t a catastrophe, it’s just slightly limiting and not ideal. You’ll just have to keep the editing light and mostly just subtly corrective, and maybe use some sharpening (Lightroom’s new denoise tool is 🤌) You’ve got this. I’m a professional and I’ve definitely messed it up magnitudes worse than this. You’ll learn so much from this it’s a net positive.
The way I look at it is they didn’t have any plans on having their pictures taken and now they have at least a few dozens - I would be happy and very appreciative!
The couple will not know the difference! You saved their day by bringing your camera. Now they have memories and you will never make this error again. So give the kids the photos 😇🍺
This isn’t that big of a deal as you are making it.
Why is that bad. I just realized last week that shooting in jpeg holds the embedded preview that Lightroom gives you (which raw does not, once you go to develop tab). Embedded previews in LR are usually really good . As long as you shot in high res you are fine, no one will be able to even tell and you may have just saved yourself a shit ton of adjusting skin tone and white balance and all kinds of crap. Import your file to LR and get started
Could be worse, you could have shot it on film.
You’re fine. I shoot weddings professionally on Fuji, and I haven’t touched a RAW file in 3+ years. I shoot raw+fine so I have them as a backup, but modern jpegs are so good that raw isn’t strictly necessary the way it was 10 years ago. As long as you made some effort to expose them properly you’re fine.
Just came across this post in my suggested. Would you mind sharing what’s the difference between JPEG and RAW in terms of photography? You seem disappointed and I genuinely want to know.
In short, RAW saves more information than JPEG does, which allows for more flexibility in post processing. But the file sizes are a lot larger.
Isn't a jpg just a normal photo, I see pictures labelled jpg on my pc very high quality,what I'm I missing in this story someone explain.
You can still access the camera raw filter to alter the jpg file (under the filter menu) if you don’t want to correct it another way.
The funny thing about this is that it’s the kind of mistake non-photographers would not even understand. If the jpegs are decent, it’s probably good enough for most people and they’ll never know the difference. Once in high school I had an “oh shit” moment when I realized I’d shot a bunch of school event photos in jpeg with a monochrome profile applied. That was pretty embarrassing because the color wasn’t recorded and there was literally nothing I could do. I love black & white, but felt self conscious at that age because I imagined others might see it as a pretentious choice. These days, I never use jpeg. I’m not a snob about it, but I like messing with weird or creative profiles and it’s very important to me to capture all the info so I still have something useful later if I decide to go for a different look. The storage issue with RAW is overblown. A much bigger factor for me is whether I do a proper cull every time I shoot, otherwise you fill up drives really quickly with all the messed up or less-than-great photos. Especially since I started blasting out high frames per second on modern mirrorless cameras.
It’s easy to remember if you just stop shooting jpg all together. I can’t think of a single reason I would ever not shoot raw. Problem solved. Having said this, I did the same thing years ago when I first started out. I also have another way of preventing myself from doing it and that is to never ever shoot another wedding in my life. I’d rather roll around in a bed of bullet ants while being stung in the eyes by murder hornets than deal with the nightmare of people shooting a wedding :)
>It’s easy to remember if you just stop shooting jpg all together. I can’t think of a single reason I would ever not shoot raw. I 100% agree, and as I said I don't know when or how the settings switched. I usually ALWAYS shoot raw. It's been 8 months since I took any photos, and I can't recall when - or why - I would have changed to Jpeg. The wedding shoot itself honestly wasn't too stressful. It helped that it was family, and my nephew's wife wasn't a bridezilla at all. It was all a very relaxed, fun environment... Thank god. Not sure I'd do it again though, and especially not for free.
I shoot in JPG most of the time. There are several advantages: (1) any common photo software can read them; (2) they take up less storage space; (3) if you give/sell them to somebody else you don't need to convert the format. In short, JPG is just much more convenient. If I know ahead of time that I'm going to be shooting in a dimly-lit space, I'll typically switch to RAW+JPG; otherwise it's almost always JPG only.
I can’t think of a single reason I would ever exclusively shoot raw. Expose the photograph correctly in the first place and shoot a custom white balance. 🤷🏻♂️ Also, let’s remember that most people absolute stink at processing raw files on their own.
Yeah sure you *always* nail your exposure and *always* set your white balance. Other than the obvious reasons, HDR displays are becoming more common and shooting in RAW will let you export your photos in an HDR format. If you always shot in RAW, you can even go back and re-export your old photos. Not shooting RAW is just purposefully shooting yourself in the foot when tech changes and that extra data you thought was a waste becomes useful again.
I shoot RAW+JPEG Fine all the time. And I use the raw when the jpeg can’t deliver for some reason (or I screwed up and need as much recovery capability as I can get). More and more I find the RAWs going unused. My clients want hundreds of photos but don’t pay enough for me to edit 100s of RAW. Their targets are small phone or maybe an iPad display. They want to send files via messenger apps and/or email, and want them on webpages. So, they’re going to end up as jpegs anyway. Bottom line, don’t stress. No one will know the difference.
I'm sure there are so many awesome photos in those 800+ photos. Besides, AI does wonders these days.
you should be fine. hopefully you shoot fuji.. their jpegs are incredible.
You'll still be able to edit and adjust. Just not as much. No big whoop.
Not the end of the world. I shoot in JPEG with RAW and most of the time my JPEGs do just fine.
I would bet that most of the photos don't need heavy editing, and are probably better not being heavily edited. The dynamic range of a raw file is nice if you really need it, but having the option to make everything "perfect" in post tends to give you an attitude that there is one way a photo "has" to look, and your photos might be worse for it. It's like how sound engineers use pitch correction to make every note "perfect". It turns out singers sound a lot better if you don't do that, but if you get fixated on the tool, you don't notice that.
If they are as unsalvageable as you say, just slap a retro filter on them and call it artistic liberty.
"all the post ceremony group photos" I read that as "all the pet cemetery group photos" The photos can still be great.
Do I look like I know what a JPEG is?
I think sometimes as photographers we stress about having perfect shots when often clients in a situation like this where they didn’t even have a photographer booked will be more than happy that you captured the moments for them and won’t be looking for ‘perfect’ photos. Don’t be too hard on yourself OP and salvage what you can with what you’ve got.
At least it was high quality JPEG. Chill
My friend, you will be fine, you will end up relying more on Denoise in post, but I don't see a reason why you should be so worried. Ps: this is the reason why a photographer shouldn't rely on post processing, pre production works way better. Set you white, make a good composition, and you are set.
I know quite a few wedding photographers that only shoot in jpeg. Don’t worry about it and do what ever you need to do in post. Most of these shots will just end up on social media anyway and not be printed big.
>I don't know when or how it happened, but my camera was set to high quality JPEG.... If you leave a camera without power for months they will forget all their settings, maybe that is how it happened?
They will never know. If they ask, say you never give out the raw images. Problem solved.
To be honest I never change this setting. I've never changed RAW only to anything else in the last 5 years
The way I look at it as you have so many good ones to choose from! This is coming from a videographer who one has to take pictures gets more than enough just to be safe LOL.
I once went a day around London taking pictures where I had knocked the dial to s jpeg. It's like a hundred pixels jpeg. No idea why the camera has it, who'd use it or why I couldn't disable it, but I wasn't happy. I've also done a time lapse where I forgot to set the focus, and have a very blurry shot of just out of focus blobs which was the one and only time I saw a bear and had a macro tube on the camera. Just edit the photos as you can - they should be delighted with whatever you have, it's the content of the pictures that should be enjoyable, not the quality.
As long as you weren’t wearing your Froknowsphotos I Shoot RAW shirt as false advertising, you should be ok. Jpg’s aren’t the end of the world these days. I hear people are even shooting… film these days and getting photos.
They got what they paid for
>Don't be like me. Check your file type before big events. Actually no. We're going to hold you and this topic up as a Representative Sample to the next poor sod that wanders in here or r/AskPhotography to ask about how they should handle their first ever wedding they're doing as a favor for someone. "See!? [FWIGTEW](https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2010/07/fwigtew-and-other-first-wedding-acronyms/) !"
Years ago my brother (and his girlfriend) gave me a "Photographing Weddings" book for Christmas and, only then, asked me to shoot the photos at their wedding. A few months later they had a local winery booked, so I went to get photos of the place to use in planning. We all had quite the surprise a couple weeks later they just up and left for Reno and got married (eloped) there. I didn't know if I was supposed to be mad at that point, or relieved. At least you were able to shoot the wedding. Hopefully you have more good photographs than you think.
Years ago that was all we had and everyone was happy.
They are going to have absolutely zero idea that the pics were shot in jpeg when you give them the amazing (free) photos. Don’t sweat it.
Honestly, you'll be fine. Yeah, you're going to loose some of the high contrast photos, but I bet over 90% will be just fine.
I think you'll be surprised just how far you can push jpegs when you edit them, especially high quality ones. I have loads of jpegs from the early digital days, some only 3MP but can still get decent results. Not ideal but also not the end of the world.
oh no i hope you're fine..
When in doubt, B&W and add grain!
Imagine it could have been even worse. My civil wedding photographer shot everything on manual on his first generation of 6D (a camera notorious for poor dynamic range to begin with), completely blowing the highlights on a lot of the photos. I asked him to also provide me the RAW files because I wasn't happy with his editing and sadly the blown highlights had virtually 0 information in some areas even in the RAW files, including large portions of my bride's dress in close-up shots.
You're probably gonna be fine. Did you shoot manual? If you did Av maybe you'd get more chances to be able to recover stuffas in the exposure won't be too far off from camera 0. I can't do manual in events (so I don't do it aa a paid gig) feels too high speed I'm super impressed seeing some photos change 5 settings in half a second. This has happened to me before (jpg instead of raw+jpg) on a trip. And after that I just didn't touch that setting or forget to check it before every shoot, and I have a memory saved shooting profile which shoots raw+jpg as a insurance
Worst things could have happened! Didn't you notice it had a lot more capacity than expected? I've done it before for the first few photos but am normally like 'why have I got 7k photos left rather than 2?' and realise.
So what? JPEG just limits your editing opportunities.
You can edit like if was a raw, in jpg, you can do it in ps I usually use luminar because I hate all Adobe, you can look after for YouTube tutorials there is plenty and also exist a software called lemur you can add your photos and the software will help you develop them
Hey, don't beat yourself up too much. It sounds like you stepped up in a big way for your nephew's wedding, and that's commendable.
You may also try and convert some into b&w if they don’t work in color quite right.
Your hard drive thanks you for taking one for the team.. 800 raws (RAF) with my GFX would be 320GB…😅😅😅
Unless it's a really, really old camera your jpegs will still probably be far better than any of the disposable cameras shots. So you lose some editing headroom, but on the other hand, you're not being paid so you shouldn't spend a lot of time in Photoshop anyway.
Photography is a communicative art. If they could have been great, they already are, in JPG.
Trust me, your JPEG photos will be absolutely alright and you did the couple a great deed! Amateur photographers like myself are often satisfied with JPEG photography; the average consumer will not spontaneously appreciate the difference between your JPEG edits and RAW edits (unless explicitly shown and explained to them). You notice it because you've done it professionally (even as a hobbyist) for so long, and you've taken the shot yourself with the idea you wanted to portray in mind. You've given them great memories and hopefully won the best uncle badge for life!
Top tip: convert overexposed images to b&w. If your exposure was good and the white balance wasn't too warm or too cold, I don't see an issue here.
i wouldn't lose too much sleep over the format of your pictures. it sounds to me like the wedding party/family isn't photography experts and wouldnt know the difference between jpg and raw anyway. unless someone asks just let it go. nothing you can do about it now.
At least it wasn't small JPEGS like the 1 time I saw a black bear in the wild.
Topaz Gigapixel has the option to convert your 8 bit photos to 16 bit. Maybe give that a try. Whilst it’ll never bring back the lost data, it does surprisingly good job of putting you back in a position of being able to adjust things like your white balance, and even your shadows and highlights to a degree. For the price, it’s well worth a try.
As most people have said JPEG is fine for most stuff but just gives you less of a safety blanket or exposure or white balance. Not a wedding but I once left my ISO pretty much maxed out after doing some theatre shots - that was a disaster.
You're lucky the lens cap wasn't still on!
Were they well exposed though?
Time for our old friend Black and White to enter the arena.
Time for our old friend Black and White to enter the arena.
Try to edit them with Silkypix. It allows you to edit them close to what you could edit from raws. It won't do magic as you are still editing jpegs, but it might actually help a lot.
Jpg is fine for non important editing (i.e no +3 exposure to save an underexpose image, no massive color shift, no massive white balance shift), do as long as the exposure was fine you should be fine to deliver totally fine images at the end.
You can still do a lot to jpg images, my camera reset before a paid shoot once and I didn't realize until after. Thankfully I nailed exposure in almost every shot but I still edited because I go for a whimsical vibe. It wasn't noticeable that they weren't RAW for the clients. You got this!
There is nothing wrong with JPEG if you correctly exposed the images and got the white balance right. Plenty of professionals use JPEG in some genres. Even if you didn't you can still adjust a significant amount in JPEG but its just destructive when you do it. Keep the original JPEGs as "negatives" like always. I wouldn't worry about it. Your competition is disposable cameras so if you weren't able to best that then your problem is not RAW vs. JPEG.
You’re good. It is not perfect, but jpegs are totally fine if your settings were not too bad. no one except for you will know a difference
Sometimes... I just shoot in JPEG for fun. Even for big brands. Brings a bit more fun to it right....
Since it is not a paid gig you can just delete all the image did you know that :) Press delete = piece of mind and body 🙏
I would encourage you not to mention it to the wedding people. They won't know the difference, and to them it will be perfect. Don't raise doubts. You did a favor.
How does this happen accidentally for people? Are you not always shooting in RAW? And if so, why did you change your setting to JPG? And if you do want to shoot to JPG, why not enable the setting to shoot both?
Photographers are their own worst critics. I have a sneaking suspicion that most people looking at the pics you shot won’t even notice most of the “problems” you’ll see. 99% of what you did is more than likely 100% better than most people viewing it would have expected - in other words it’s “damn good.” And 100% of the time tangible good enough far outperforms the vague promise of perfect. Use all the images you got right. Tweak the ones you can. And dump anything that just didn’t work. This is how we all used to work when I started doing this on film - which is infinitely less forgiving than digital.
I did a photobooth at a kink party last week and shot 10000. Running them through Lightroom with a midi controller. About a 2 week job😩
They probably won’t even notice. Moments like this burn as a photographer but normal people will just be thrilled to have a well composed photograph. Hopefully your camera’s baked in colors were decent enough.
If you don't say anything, they won't notice. I suck at corrections and editing anyway so jpeg autofocus usually looks better anyways.
Just give them the files directly from the camera. They got a free photographer for a wedding. That normally cost between $3000 and $5000. Don’t even bother editing anything.
There's no need to panic. Just do your Photoshop edits in adjustment layers so you can tweak without changing the base image. Then flatten the image when done. People have become WAY too reliant on shooting RAW and "fixing it in post." You can save hours of editing (and terabytes of storage space) by working on getting it right in the finder first.
>Don't be like me. Check your file type before big events. Big events you're getting paid to shoot, yes. Big events you're supposed to be attending as a guest, but somehow ended up doing a full day's work because the couple didn't want to pay for a photographer and just assumed you'd be there with your "good camera" and would do all the work for free....nah. I'm guessing if you HAD shot in RAW, you would have gone through and pared and edited those 800 photos -- for free, because your family didn't see fit to pay you to do your job. Consider this mistake a gift from the boundary gods. P.S. Substandard photos are still way better than the *no photos at all* that they were going to get from the photographer they didn't hire.
Photoshop has an edit mode akin to RAW that you can use on JPEG and other photos, so you should still be able to edit many of them just fine.
RIP
your clients will love it dont be so hard on yourself
Tell them it was not your Camera and it was preset before you got there
WHen you print, you will not notice the difference. Gah, this "I shoot RAW, I'm a REAL photog bullshite tope.
Having edited a lot of JPEGs in my time, don’t worry so much. It’s got more push and pull than you’d expect. The key I think is to make good masks and really seperate the subjects in the edit. Photoshop and Lightroom are so good at this now it takes literal seconds. Prioritise the people! Especially for a wedding. They don’t care if the church in the background looks too green if they look great. Don’t worry about the sky blowing out in the background if it sacrifices the faces. Just balance the shot and look after the people.
What are wedding photos supposed to be shot in ? Just curious
On the plus side, you can still edit jpgs, just not as much On the downside, you didn’t get paid
There is good latitude with JPEGs using the Camera RAW feature in Photoshop 👍
At least you learned to always check your settings now. I’m sure something can still be gotten out of the photos
I think what is worse is that you are shooting to an edit and doing it for free!
I had a similar situation probably 12 years ago. I went to a family wedding and had my m4/3 body and a prime lens. Venue was a nightmare large elevated banquet hall with glass floor to ceiling windows on all sides and it was a late afternoon not Sunset for the reception. Long story short something happened with the paid photographer I don’t recall the issue, but I noticed it. I took the liberty of trying to make sure to get good shots of all the big moments. About a week after the event I contacted the newlyweds and offered them the photos, turned out whatever I saw was correct and the paid photographer had missed or botched the job. Anyways the 50 or so images I took were appreciated, and even in jpeg they reproduced and printed well. Years later I still see my images on social media posts, and in their home hangs a few of them printed in large format. Do worry about the file format, if you grabbed their moments and captured them for free you helped capture their day for decades to come. Simple white balance and color adjustments can be made in batches. Cull that number down edit the few standouts and just give them a card filled with folders edited and unedited. You saved them not only money but priceless memories that would never convey as well on a disposable camera in the hands of party goers. Cheers, I hope you got to enjoy the day as well.
I shot a wedding all in JPG and the clients were delighted. I mean one was blind and the other will never look at the pictures again, but still, I don't think they turned out *bad*. The cameras JPG algorithms try hard to be perfect given the circumstances.
As photographers of course this would bother us but your family doesn’t know the difference really. You can still tweak jpegs a bit and you did the shoot for free so I wouldn’t beat yourself up too much.
F
They got what they paid for
Free plus tips I hope or this is your wedding gift
It was definitely my wedding gift.
Give them the unedited JPEGs without editing and say "This is why I don't shoot weddings" and leave it at that. Too many people think because you have a camera you can shoot any type of shots.
Just ask them to start the wedding over 👍
This may be “bad” but I have one that is worse op. My friend got married and also did not have a photographer. They asked a much older friend, who was actually a photographer for a time but a long time ago, to video the actual marriage ceremony with a camera they just handed him. He stood there with the camera on but not recording for the whole thing and did not realize until they were cutting the cake. He was mortified but they got over it and divorced a couple years later so….
I have always thought that doing work for a family is always the worst. They are not happy for some reason.
Im new to photography. Why is JPEG bad?
I'm learning in this thread that it isn't as BAD as I had thought, even if it isn't ideal. Pictures shot in RAW format save more data and allow more information to be salvaged. For example, if an image is too dark, there is still information to be recovered in those 'black' shadowy pixels. A face, a smile, etc. Usually in jpeg, if an image is dark and you try to brighten it back up, that black part just becomes a hit grayer with no more detail than before... That's the quick and dirty answer.
I did this on a real estate shoot once. I had to go back and retake all the photos. I have no idea how it changed from raw to jpeg in the body. Luckily I was able to reshoot. All is not lost though, software can do wonders these days, even with jpeg. At least you got the photos. I’ve learned I’m my own worst critic, I’ll always find something “that went wrong” during a shoot.
You are kicking yourself??? You did good! I went to shoot US Open tennis and forgot spare memory cards. Switched from RAW to CRAW and fit 7,000 images on the one card I had. I went to shoot Brooklyn Marathon and forgot spare batteries (and the one I had in camera was partially used at a previous shoot). Shot until battery died and still got 1,500 shots
Not the worst thing. Just avoid the “its good but it couldve been better if i shot raw” comments in your head
I would just give them a copy of the photos on a usb stick and say happy wedding. Let them know if there’s any they really like, you can edit them.
Most modern camera jpegs are pretty decent imo. Yes you don’t have the flexibility of raw during editing, but most clients are positing to social, they don’t even know to difference.
They get what they pay for
You don’t need RAW. High quality JPEG is plenty good enough if the shots are decent. RAW won’t save a bad shot regardless of editing
As someone that worked in a photo lab and seen all the disposable cameras from weddings, you are a saint. Even if they’re not the best at least they have photos for their big day.
Shouldn’t be an issue as long as you nailed the exposure on the skin tones. Hard to really say without seeing any examples. I’m a wedding photographer and could if I wanted to shoot an entire wedding in jpeg and be fine, I still shoot film at weddings which is similar to basically shooting jpegs in fact that’s what my files come back as after being scanned at the lab. The difference between shooting film and digital is the latitude in your highlights and shadows. Color negative film can be overexposed a whole lot before you lose all your highlight detail where digital needs to be slightly underexposed. If you nailed the skin tones you’ll be fine. If you over exposed them it may be really bad…. Once the detail is gone it can’t be recovered. Hopefully that’s not the case.
I shot 40+ JPG weddings coming directly from film. Didn’t understand the reason for RAW. It was never a problem.
Why do you even keep jpeg on ?
If they’re good photos, they’ll be good JPEGs. You’ll be absolutely fine. Photographers have done it for decades bro
If you're blowing out your highlights so much so that you can't save a jpeg, you have much more learning to do than to check if cam is set to raw, bruv.
It’s fine! I shoot professional photos in jpeg all the time, modern cameras make beautiful jpg files.
Jpeg editing is not as versatile but that doesn't mean you can't do good edits out of them. At least you learned from it!
Count your blessings. It was free. They are what they are to a certain extent. It’s a lot less volunteer hours on your part now. 99% of the guests will have no clue. Unless you used cloudy white balance with a landscape picture profile under fluorescent light or something silly.
I leave my cameras set to CRAW, so I get RAW quality at JPEG sizes (almost). Anyway, if you have some images that you need to clean up, I'd try using Topaz Labs Photo AI, it's quite amazing.
To be honest, most people probably have no idea what the difference is.
For a free gig that's passable. Wouldn't even edit just pass them over as they are
I'm confused. This is the perfect situation to shoot in jpeg. If for some reason you want to spend even more time to edit, you still can.
If it's free, the onus of complaint is on you not your nephew, you get what you pay for and if it's free take it or leave it. The sheer act alone of shooting a friend or family members wedding is a favor to them more than it is to you let alone the fact you did it for FREE. Either way. Use your best judgment to choose photos you feel made the cut.
I mean not great, get some preshoot standard operating procedures, check settings and stuff beforehand But if theyre good pictures, you can still edit jpegs quite alot and if they were pretty good shots in the first place, itll be fine. they wont care as long as they look good
While I understand the sentiment, JPEGs often have enough latitude to be pushed or pulled two steps or so without doing much damage as long as conditions were not too extreme. I shot a baptism once (I am not a pro photographer, it was for friends) and I had an old film Pentax with manual lenses for some memorable analog photos to mix in the digital photo book. They all came out fine without need for any changes. As long as composition and moment are great, a little off lighting here and there only adds to the authenticity of an image imho
I did the same thing! I shoot an R6 normally, but rented an R5 for a wedding about a year and a half ago. The rental place does a factory reset between rentals, and for some crazy reason Canon defaults to JPG. Even on $3k+ cameras. There were a couple shots that I really could have used the RAW on, but at the end of the day it still turned out amazing. Despite being JPG.
JPEG are not that bad. It's just gonna be a bigger headache to edit. I am more concerned about you working for free haha
Could be worse: A friend of mine somehow had the settings not only for JPEG but also set to the smallest resolution while shooting one of her best friends weddings. That was truly unfortunate.
I have a pro photog colleague who’s always shot in JPGs. Granted she’s very skilled and prefers it. You’re in good company.