DON’T PRINT SCREENSHOTS Photographers worst nightmare
Are you ready for a sad story?
A recent client of mine printed thank you cards with an image of mine. A beautiful image, and I highly recommend printing your images with whoever you see fit, snapfish, tesco.. or a professional lab like Loxley Colour.
This image was taken with a £2500 Canon R6 camera, with a £2600 Rf 24-70 f2.8 lens. By a person that knows how to work that stuff. And lighting, as well as rules and reasons on what makes a good image compositionally. Then the RAW file was edited in lightroom and photoshop stylistically, yet modestly and carefully.
This image was then delivered as a 12mb jpeg, in a high resolution gallery. The client has paid for very expensive equipment, training, software and file delivery.
Rather than download all the files and upload… it was easier to press the screenshot buttons on her iphone, creating a 100kb image, and press print on snapfish.
The resulting abomination of 100kb stretched over 5”x7” is a hyper pixelated meme of an image. It looked like characters from minecraft. And it bears my name, and the name of my business Lewis Cannon Photography. I hope you can appreciate the lump in my throat at the thought of all my time and effort, and the clients hard earned money to end up with a horrible end product.
Example of a good quality image. It starts to fall apart if you zoom in, as it is sized for web. Your prints should be sized appropriately for the paper type and dimensions you are printing.
It really hurt to do that to this beautiful image! Have a zoom in!
We expect our technology to provide perfect results. Sadly our phones provide a shortcut that destroys image quality. Perhaps it is the phones revenge for their cameras not being as good as SLR’s. (yet)
What are you paying for with wedding photography? The short answer is files. High quality image files. Forget the expensive equipment, expensive training, expensive hours in the editing suite and all of the expertise delivering a print worthy 300dots per inch image and knowledge of print papers and methods… You are buying files with your faces on it! Use them please!!!
I hope you enjoyed this horror story! I am telling it with a smile on my face, yet a tear in my eye for all the screenshotted images out there I don’t know about!
Thanks for reading, and always try to remember to print from a high resolution file, or let your couples know the pitfalls of expecting their phones to sort it out.
Lewis
