Digital Negatives
What are digital negatives and edited images?
Digital negatives are much like film negatives in the since that they are unedited archive images of your event. We perform very basic color corrections and adjustments on digital negative images. They are meant to be your own personal backups for your event.
Edited images have had more corrections performed on them to make them look their best and ready for print at a professional photo lab. Some of the commonly performed tasks for edited images include color corrections, contrast and saturation boost, skin retouching and sometimes some advanced retouching procedures. These are the images that appear on your galleries, our website, and our blog.
Do I own the copyright on my images?
By federal law Mark Warren Photography owns the copyright on all of our images that we capture. Our copyrights are not for sale. We provide you with usage rights for your digital negatives. This means the bride and groom or client from a portrait session will be able to make personal prints for themselves with their digital negatives and an included usage release form. Digital Negative CD’s are not to be copied and shared with family and friends as only the names of the bride and groom or client of the portrait session will be on the usage form.
Why do your edited image prints cost more than the photo lab at my local store?
Mark Warren Photography edits all our web gallery print images for color, contrast, saturation, blemishes and more. We spend much time on each image to make sure you are getting the best image quality possible. We also have our work printed a pro photography lab that produces quality that cannot be matched from budget labs. While it is true you can go to local grocery stores and discount warehouse clubs to get prints as cheap as $.19 for a 4×6, these prints do not offer the quality and consistency of a professional photo lab printer. Our print prices start at $16.00 for a 5×7 and we spend anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes per image to make sure you are getting the highest quality and best images possible. A discount lab is not going to do that for you!
We Love the edited images! Can we pay to have you edit all of the digital negatives?
As much as we would love to edit all of your images, we simply are not able to if we want to take care of all of our customers. We typically provide at least 300 proofs per wedding. We only upload about 100 edited images to your web gallery. If we were to edit all of them at our standard rate of 30.00 per hour it would take at the minimum 80 hours and that would cost you close to $3000.00 for all of the images. It would work out much cheaper to just purchase the prints you like.
What do you do to the images when you edit a photo?
There are many things that are involved in editing a photo. We use pro camera systems that produce a RAW image from the camera. Unlike a jpg image that most cameras produce, RAW images must be processed with special software and converted to a readable format like jpgs before it can be viewed. Images straight from the camera are only a starting point. Back in the film days it started with the negative. When a photographer was ready to make a print, during the printing process they would dodge or burn lights to get more or less contrast, deeper tones and more. In the digital darkroom it’s not much different from the old film days. We still do the same things but instead we now use a computer. It is still a very time consuming process. While would love to list everything we do to a photo we found it’s better to show you some before and after images.
