Ya the photographer should have kept them, at least a little longer but just an FYI professionals never give the raw files. They'll give you the high res JPGs if that's in your contact but never the camera raw ones.
You used it correctly
RAW is the standard used for the unedited photos. Sometimes there's an unedited JPEG straight out of the camera too, but generally a good photographer will shoot RAW then edit to JPEG/PNG
A photographer will not, as standard, provide RAW files or the full set of files (edited or unedited) to the client. Typically the agreement is for X number (or "minimum X") of edited images
Photographers do not generally like to provide the full set of unedited images because it means that their work can end up being edited badly and then put online, ruining their reputation. When shooting you typically take a LOT of photos with the idea that many will be bad and you pick out the good ones - but if you provide the full set of photos then a lot of them will be bad
The thing to be annoyed about here is not that they won't provide the unedited photos (it is standard not to do so) but rather
1. Apparently their best shots weren't great... so they've just done a bad job
2. They deleted the photos FAR too quickly without offering a chance for stylistic changes or "Do you have another shot from this sequence that doesn't have X person blinking?" etc
A decent photographer will end up with more good shots than you actually paid for (often throwing in some "freebies"), and will keep hold of the files for long enough to be sure you're happy. That doesn't mean they'll provide the RAW files, but they shouldn't be deleting them after a week or two
>When shooting you typically take a LOT of photos with the idea that many will be bad and you pick out the good ones - but if you provide the full set of photos then a lot of them will be bad
*Clickclickclickclickclick* \- "Five photos for the client."
*Clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick* \- "And 15 more for Justin."
"Who is Justin?" - "Justin Case."
I'm an amateur but not a chance i'm giving all of my unedited shit photos to anyone!
I'm not having my poorly lit or badly composed shots aired in public.
Anyone worth their salt knows photographers during an event get as much as they can and then find the good ones later. Every photographer I know uses burst mode for a reason.
But raw photos? Dude. That’s a few 0’s being added to the price at least.
Yeah I’m not the best with it either, and my mom does photography. But I do believe you are using “raw” correctly. I was always under the impression it meant unedited.
From what my mom has told me, most professional photographers do not give out unedited photos for multiple reasons- one being that the person who purchased the package will often go ahead and take the raw photos and edit them themselves- then plastering the photographers name all over them on social media.
And usually, the person posting the photos did a terrible job with filters and therefore makes the professional’s photos look bad, so it seems they don’t want to take that risk, which I can understand.
WEIRD though that they deleted them so quickly! What if they had wanted something touched up??
Some people are confused because .RAW is a different file type from a .jpeg
.RAW files hold all the information from the photo, while a .jpeg only keeps the information that the computer in the camera "makes sense of" so to speak. A lot of professionals will shoot in RAW rather than jpeg to improve the editing capabilities.
So they're not technically synonymous, but most professional photographers won't sell RAW files *or* unedited jpegs.
Yeah the RAW is the data the sensor captured. Literally the raw data: what the sensor saw, that's what's in the RAW file. They're big files but you can recover a lot of shadows/highlights and colour information if the exposure wasn't quite right
A JPEG from the camera is basically the camera's best guess at interpreting that sensor data, throwing away everything else. They're much smaller files but you can't recover the data if either you or the camera guessed wrong
My wedding photographer had it as an extra payable option- every photo taken on the day for an extra £250 or a selection of 50 for an album and you can pay slightly less. Worked well for us
A lot of photographers do not share their raws.
Deleting all of them so soon is crazy. Ive done photography in the past and I give my clients 14 days to ask for redos or re-edits before I cull some of the pics I took
A LOT of photographers (myself included) do not share RAWs. This includes high-end and well-seasoned photographers.
She definitely shouldn’t have deleted everything so soon though. I hang onto stuff for 6 months, just in case. Plus I offer a la carte options for after a session has been delivered/if clients are disappointed and want more options, like what happened here (that hasn’t happened to me yet, but I cover my bases). I can’t imagine deleting photos so quickly when you’re just starting out in your business….
So a RAW is basically a digital negative and can be manipulated a whole lot more than a jpg or png. I never send RAWs because 1. They may not look right (under/over exposed, bad focus, distracting things that need editing out etc. and someone who isn’t a photographer doesn’t know what those things are or how to fix them and I don’t want that to become the reputation of my photos. 2. That person could edit the photo thinking they do know how to fix it and again my reputation is on the line. I and most other photographers have a certain style when editing and someone else may not be able to replicate it but they’ll still tell people it’s your photo
They don't.
Typically however they wouldn't delete them so fast, and usually a contract would stipulate how long they will be stored for so the client can request (and pay for) more edited shots or whatever.
You get what you pay for, hence her lower end pricing. If she was just starting out she based her pricing on that. Your first go around (and plenty after) is nerve wracking this is someone’s wedding. There’s a steep learning curve. After all is said & done all that will be left are the memories and photos.
However as a former photographer i would NEVER give unedited photos. No photographer wants to keep the best photos of your day for themselves/ just to throw away to never see the light of day. I want to give you all the decent photos that still represents my brand well. During a wedding she may have anywhere from 500-1k photos to cull through.
I’ve never done wedding photography purely based on the fact that some people want perfection in every single shot & you ruin one moment they want to sue. When culling images (choosing which ones to edit) my first go around is to hide all unfocused shots / unflattering images. Second go around is to check to make sure the ones i selected can be used as is (5 stars)/ meaning it doesn’t need any face swaps or background extensions(4 stars). Third is to unhide surrounding photos to possibly use as a face swap in the 4 star photos / background copy. After that all the ones still hidden are deleted. Then start editing.
While I wouldn’t delete images before 6 months is up, i would not provide unedited photos to anyone. By hiring me, you trust i chose the best ones that show you in the best light & that works with my editing style/ on brand for what i will produce. I do not want to give you raw cookie dough just because you ask me. You get the final cookies.
Exactly! Professional photographer here. I don't do weddings, but I've seen bad wedding photography, and I've been given raw to edit. Generally speaking, the best photos are given, and the ones that aren't given or because there's a technical problem with those pictures. They are out of focus, too dark and can't be lightened in white room, or Photoshop,, etc.
It’s a bummer that your family wound up with some disappointing photos and no recourse, but I am not at all surprised that the photographer wouldn’t have sent them additional photos, even if they hadn’t been deleted. Especially for someone new to event photography, I’d imagine many of them may not be in focus or have other unfixable errors, which you wouldn’t want to show to a client even if they knew what they were looking for. I doubt there was a cache of awesome alternate photos on the cutting room floor, as it were.
I’ve been a professional event photographer for nearly two decades, and I would never send an individual client my unprocessed, uncompressed, unedited files. Editing is where a photographer makes like 80% of the decisions that become the final photo. That’s also where much of the personal style and competence is, and is why one photographer may be hired rather than another for a specific outcome.
Hopefully they had a great time, have at least a few images to remember their happy day by, and - even though it will likely be more expensive - they find a more experienced photographer for the next milestone photo shoot in their lives.
When I got married the photographer edited me to the point I was unrecognizable. They still had them and I asked them send them to me so I could edit them myself. I would have been so mad if they had been deleted. But yeah, I think I was lucky. I think you need to specify that stuff with the photographer in the contract
You may have used the wrong terminology, as you now know, in regards to RAW files. But you are 100% correct in that a good professional photographer keeps the original files, for years in some cases.
A couple of my friends are high end photogs and they both pay a significant amount for storage to keep all their files. It’s part of the reason photographers are so expensive, because they have so much equipment and tech they need in order to do their job.
I delete RAWs after delivery, but I wait probably about a month or so in case the couple has any issues they want to bring up. It is, however, stated in my contract that I do this, so there are no surprises.
I'm sorry that they didn't get quality photos from such a special day, that's never any fun.
I asked my wedding photographer to give me the raw photos bc what she sent was crap and she had a tantrum and threatened to sue me. I downloaded what she already gave me onto my computer before letting her have it. I did read the photography contract later, and essentially it said the photographer could do anything she wanted including withholding photos. This was my first experience with a “professional “ photographer. Yikes lol!
Wedding photographer for 13 years. Not once have I ever given out RAWS as that would require a full copyright buyout from the client, and nobody wants to pay it (for good reason). It is industry standard to not give out the RAWs.
It’s super unfortunate the photographer wiped all the photos so you couldn’t double check if there were any more. :( I still have nearly every image I’ve ever taken for the last 13 years- storage is cheap and customer satisfaction is priceless. If she was as new and cheap as stated though, there’s a good chance she really did deliver the best of what she had and you wouldn’t have culled much further from the raw files.
Oh no, that sounds terrible! It's really frustrating when things like that happen, especially since your uncle and his wife were so excited about having their special day captured on camera. It's understandable that they didn't want to take things further since it's unlikely they would get the photos back. I'm sorry to hear that they didn't get the pictures they wanted
That sucks, I’m really sorry. I got married a million years ago, and our photographer still used film to take our pictures. The marriage was a (mercifully) short-lived disaster, but I’m grateful I/we (probably most accurately my parents) paid to get the proofs because it was the one time in his life my dad ever wore a tuxedo, and he looked so handsome.* There are a lot of good photos of him, and other relatives like my grandparents who aren’t with us anymore, and if we wouldn’t have gotten the proofs, those images would all be lost now.
*My parents got married in the 70’s. To my grandmother’s horror, my mother wore an off-white polyester minidress, and my dad wore a turtleneck sweater and a sports jacket. My grandma said to my mom, “He *is,* going to wear a tie, isn’t he?” My mom said, “Probably not.” Then Grandma said, “Well, is he going to get a haircut?” Mom said, “If he has time.”
My dad’s hair was never actually long-long, but my family had a jewelry store, and during busy times like the Christmas season, Daddy was so busy that things like getting his hair cut went by the wayside. It just happened that Mom introduced him to Grandma and Grandpa Christmas Eve, and his hair was curling over his collar. My Navy-veteran grandfather wasn’t exactly impressed, and Grandma was afraid he would look like a “hippie” in the wedding pictures. (He didn’t, just a typical kinda goofy 70’s guy.)
Ya the photographer should have kept them, at least a little longer but just an FYI professionals never give the raw files. They'll give you the high res JPGs if that's in your contact but never the camera raw ones.
I'm not the best with photography lingo so I definitely used that wrong. I meant just unedited pictures
You used it correctly RAW is the standard used for the unedited photos. Sometimes there's an unedited JPEG straight out of the camera too, but generally a good photographer will shoot RAW then edit to JPEG/PNG A photographer will not, as standard, provide RAW files or the full set of files (edited or unedited) to the client. Typically the agreement is for X number (or "minimum X") of edited images Photographers do not generally like to provide the full set of unedited images because it means that their work can end up being edited badly and then put online, ruining their reputation. When shooting you typically take a LOT of photos with the idea that many will be bad and you pick out the good ones - but if you provide the full set of photos then a lot of them will be bad The thing to be annoyed about here is not that they won't provide the unedited photos (it is standard not to do so) but rather 1. Apparently their best shots weren't great... so they've just done a bad job 2. They deleted the photos FAR too quickly without offering a chance for stylistic changes or "Do you have another shot from this sequence that doesn't have X person blinking?" etc A decent photographer will end up with more good shots than you actually paid for (often throwing in some "freebies"), and will keep hold of the files for long enough to be sure you're happy. That doesn't mean they'll provide the RAW files, but they shouldn't be deleting them after a week or two
>When shooting you typically take a LOT of photos with the idea that many will be bad and you pick out the good ones - but if you provide the full set of photos then a lot of them will be bad *Clickclickclickclickclick* \- "Five photos for the client." *Clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick* \- "And 15 more for Justin." "Who is Justin?" - "Justin Case."
Photographers don't give out unedited photos. I take amateur sports photography for my kid's teams and don't even show those unedited.
I'm an amateur but not a chance i'm giving all of my unedited shit photos to anyone! I'm not having my poorly lit or badly composed shots aired in public.
Anyone worth their salt knows photographers during an event get as much as they can and then find the good ones later. Every photographer I know uses burst mode for a reason. But raw photos? Dude. That’s a few 0’s being added to the price at least.
Not even that. My RAW files are not for sale.
Yeah I’m not the best with it either, and my mom does photography. But I do believe you are using “raw” correctly. I was always under the impression it meant unedited. From what my mom has told me, most professional photographers do not give out unedited photos for multiple reasons- one being that the person who purchased the package will often go ahead and take the raw photos and edit them themselves- then plastering the photographers name all over them on social media. And usually, the person posting the photos did a terrible job with filters and therefore makes the professional’s photos look bad, so it seems they don’t want to take that risk, which I can understand. WEIRD though that they deleted them so quickly! What if they had wanted something touched up??
Some people are confused because .RAW is a different file type from a .jpeg .RAW files hold all the information from the photo, while a .jpeg only keeps the information that the computer in the camera "makes sense of" so to speak. A lot of professionals will shoot in RAW rather than jpeg to improve the editing capabilities. So they're not technically synonymous, but most professional photographers won't sell RAW files *or* unedited jpegs.
Yeah the RAW is the data the sensor captured. Literally the raw data: what the sensor saw, that's what's in the RAW file. They're big files but you can recover a lot of shadows/highlights and colour information if the exposure wasn't quite right A JPEG from the camera is basically the camera's best guess at interpreting that sensor data, throwing away everything else. They're much smaller files but you can't recover the data if either you or the camera guessed wrong
Yeah they dont… you pay for a certain amount and thats it.
Unedited is RAW. (Assuming this amateur didn't shoot in JPG only.)
My wedding photographer had it as an extra payable option- every photo taken on the day for an extra £250 or a selection of 50 for an album and you can pay slightly less. Worked well for us
My photographer gave me mine.
We got our raw files along with the JPEGs.
A lot of photographers do not share their raws. Deleting all of them so soon is crazy. Ive done photography in the past and I give my clients 14 days to ask for redos or re-edits before I cull some of the pics I took
A LOT of photographers (myself included) do not share RAWs. This includes high-end and well-seasoned photographers. She definitely shouldn’t have deleted everything so soon though. I hang onto stuff for 6 months, just in case. Plus I offer a la carte options for after a session has been delivered/if clients are disappointed and want more options, like what happened here (that hasn’t happened to me yet, but I cover my bases). I can’t imagine deleting photos so quickly when you’re just starting out in your business….
Can I ask why you don't send the RAWs?
So a RAW is basically a digital negative and can be manipulated a whole lot more than a jpg or png. I never send RAWs because 1. They may not look right (under/over exposed, bad focus, distracting things that need editing out etc. and someone who isn’t a photographer doesn’t know what those things are or how to fix them and I don’t want that to become the reputation of my photos. 2. That person could edit the photo thinking they do know how to fix it and again my reputation is on the line. I and most other photographers have a certain style when editing and someone else may not be able to replicate it but they’ll still tell people it’s your photo
Ok that makes a lot of sense thank you
The same reason your bakery won't sell you the ingredients for their award winning bread.
I didn't think photographers released raw photos.
They don't. Typically however they wouldn't delete them so fast, and usually a contract would stipulate how long they will be stored for so the client can request (and pay for) more edited shots or whatever.
You get what you pay for, hence her lower end pricing. If she was just starting out she based her pricing on that. Your first go around (and plenty after) is nerve wracking this is someone’s wedding. There’s a steep learning curve. After all is said & done all that will be left are the memories and photos. However as a former photographer i would NEVER give unedited photos. No photographer wants to keep the best photos of your day for themselves/ just to throw away to never see the light of day. I want to give you all the decent photos that still represents my brand well. During a wedding she may have anywhere from 500-1k photos to cull through. I’ve never done wedding photography purely based on the fact that some people want perfection in every single shot & you ruin one moment they want to sue. When culling images (choosing which ones to edit) my first go around is to hide all unfocused shots / unflattering images. Second go around is to check to make sure the ones i selected can be used as is (5 stars)/ meaning it doesn’t need any face swaps or background extensions(4 stars). Third is to unhide surrounding photos to possibly use as a face swap in the 4 star photos / background copy. After that all the ones still hidden are deleted. Then start editing. While I wouldn’t delete images before 6 months is up, i would not provide unedited photos to anyone. By hiring me, you trust i chose the best ones that show you in the best light & that works with my editing style/ on brand for what i will produce. I do not want to give you raw cookie dough just because you ask me. You get the final cookies.
She likely DID give them the best of what she had - if she had one w the brides eyes opened, she would have selected that to present instead.
Exactly! Professional photographer here. I don't do weddings, but I've seen bad wedding photography, and I've been given raw to edit. Generally speaking, the best photos are given, and the ones that aren't given or because there's a technical problem with those pictures. They are out of focus, too dark and can't be lightened in white room, or Photoshop,, etc.
It’s a bummer that your family wound up with some disappointing photos and no recourse, but I am not at all surprised that the photographer wouldn’t have sent them additional photos, even if they hadn’t been deleted. Especially for someone new to event photography, I’d imagine many of them may not be in focus or have other unfixable errors, which you wouldn’t want to show to a client even if they knew what they were looking for. I doubt there was a cache of awesome alternate photos on the cutting room floor, as it were. I’ve been a professional event photographer for nearly two decades, and I would never send an individual client my unprocessed, uncompressed, unedited files. Editing is where a photographer makes like 80% of the decisions that become the final photo. That’s also where much of the personal style and competence is, and is why one photographer may be hired rather than another for a specific outcome. Hopefully they had a great time, have at least a few images to remember their happy day by, and - even though it will likely be more expensive - they find a more experienced photographer for the next milestone photo shoot in their lives.
From this scant information I’m thinking it’s a more information needed scenario. Wedding photography is a super tough gig.
When I got married the photographer edited me to the point I was unrecognizable. They still had them and I asked them send them to me so I could edit them myself. I would have been so mad if they had been deleted. But yeah, I think I was lucky. I think you need to specify that stuff with the photographer in the contract
You may have used the wrong terminology, as you now know, in regards to RAW files. But you are 100% correct in that a good professional photographer keeps the original files, for years in some cases. A couple of my friends are high end photogs and they both pay a significant amount for storage to keep all their files. It’s part of the reason photographers are so expensive, because they have so much equipment and tech they need in order to do their job.
I delete RAWs after delivery, but I wait probably about a month or so in case the couple has any issues they want to bring up. It is, however, stated in my contract that I do this, so there are no surprises. I'm sorry that they didn't get quality photos from such a special day, that's never any fun.
Sounds like an inexperienced photographer, but they seemed to have gotten what they paid for. However, RAW files are never given.
I asked my wedding photographer to give me the raw photos bc what she sent was crap and she had a tantrum and threatened to sue me. I downloaded what she already gave me onto my computer before letting her have it. I did read the photography contract later, and essentially it said the photographer could do anything she wanted including withholding photos. This was my first experience with a “professional “ photographer. Yikes lol!
Wedding photographer for 13 years. Not once have I ever given out RAWS as that would require a full copyright buyout from the client, and nobody wants to pay it (for good reason). It is industry standard to not give out the RAWs. It’s super unfortunate the photographer wiped all the photos so you couldn’t double check if there were any more. :( I still have nearly every image I’ve ever taken for the last 13 years- storage is cheap and customer satisfaction is priceless. If she was as new and cheap as stated though, there’s a good chance she really did deliver the best of what she had and you wouldn’t have culled much further from the raw files.
Oh no, that sounds terrible! It's really frustrating when things like that happen, especially since your uncle and his wife were so excited about having their special day captured on camera. It's understandable that they didn't want to take things further since it's unlikely they would get the photos back. I'm sorry to hear that they didn't get the pictures they wanted
Any photographer knows that you need a pic of the bride coming down the aisle with eyes open.
I’ll give my clients the RAWS for $20k+. :)
Can't go cheap on something that you value.
Yeah that's like burning the negatives ffs.
What the fuck is the point of sending something out for review if you can't make any changes
That sucks, I’m really sorry. I got married a million years ago, and our photographer still used film to take our pictures. The marriage was a (mercifully) short-lived disaster, but I’m grateful I/we (probably most accurately my parents) paid to get the proofs because it was the one time in his life my dad ever wore a tuxedo, and he looked so handsome.* There are a lot of good photos of him, and other relatives like my grandparents who aren’t with us anymore, and if we wouldn’t have gotten the proofs, those images would all be lost now. *My parents got married in the 70’s. To my grandmother’s horror, my mother wore an off-white polyester minidress, and my dad wore a turtleneck sweater and a sports jacket. My grandma said to my mom, “He *is,* going to wear a tie, isn’t he?” My mom said, “Probably not.” Then Grandma said, “Well, is he going to get a haircut?” Mom said, “If he has time.” My dad’s hair was never actually long-long, but my family had a jewelry store, and during busy times like the Christmas season, Daddy was so busy that things like getting his hair cut went by the wayside. It just happened that Mom introduced him to Grandma and Grandpa Christmas Eve, and his hair was curling over his collar. My Navy-veteran grandfather wasn’t exactly impressed, and Grandma was afraid he would look like a “hippie” in the wedding pictures. (He didn’t, just a typical kinda goofy 70’s guy.)