R.E.A.L. RAW Embedded Album Layout

We learned photography back in the film days. With film all of the information that was capable of being captured was saved in negatives. In digital, there is something similar known as the "RAW" file. A RAW file contains all the information that a camera has about an image in one large file, all of it. Decisions can be made later on as to proper exposure and color balance using computers and specialized software. Up to this point, this is what most wedding photographers do, but this is where we go the extra mile. When a photographer is done making fine adjustments with the files they convert the file into JPG files. JPG files are great, they the one international format for photography. But there are limits to their greatness. When a file is saved as a JPG it is also compressed, varying from a little to a lot. With compression comes a loss of information. The darker areas of the image are compressed more than the lighter areas. The higher the compression the less information is saved. Thus JPG files aren't perfect. Saving in this format is often more of a factor of convience. They may not be ready for output but they are easy to handle.

You can think of a jpg file in terms of prepairing food. The last step is to bake the food, converting to a jpg file is like baking the file. The worst thing you can do to a file that has been saved as a JPG file is to go back and work on the color balance, brightness and saturation once again. Very often this information isn't there and the computer has to make a guess as what is missing; not good. Another common thing is to sharpen the images before the files are saved as JPG files. Sharpened images aren't meant to be reworked, ever.

When designing an album images that looked fine on their own need to be adjusted when compared to other images on the same page. Darkening, lightening, or taking out a distracting color is simply part of the album design process. There is always fine tuning that happens.

The problem with adjusting JPG in an album design is that the files have already been baked, so adjusting them and saving them again is like twice baking the files. It's great if you are working with potatoes, not so so good for a digital image file.

Embedding RAW files

Because we want our albums to be the very best they can possibly be we embed the raw files in our layouts. When it comes time to fine tune the files we are working with the RAW files. RAW files can adjusted over and over again without any loss or degradation. Layouts with RAW files embedded is simply way too much work for the average studio, they have no interest in it. We had to develop our own proprietary system to do these designs efficiently. Regardless, it's a lot more work than simply working with JPG files, but the end results are significantly better.

The other issue is that designing in this manner pushes a computer to it's limits. The file sizes are HUGE with all those embedded RAW files in the layout. Most of the stock computers you find on the market are too light weight to handle the workload. We had to custom build our computers to be able to work effeciently.

So, does it make a difference?

The answer is yes, no, and it depends who you ask. There seems to be smoother transitions in image tone, and less noise in the darker parts of the images. People who look at it often tell us our images have an "High Definition" look about them in the albums. We are also able to match up images better on a page. This solves a lot of problems especially when we are trying to make to match up images from two different photographers using two different camera systems.

We can see a big difference but then again we look at images 60 hours a week. Then again we've seen a lot of albums that have acceptable photography but zero quality control. The images looked like they came right out of the camera without adjustments and put into the album. And the clients loved it! So, if you have low standards for your photography then no it doesn't make much of a difference. If you a discerning eye and want something better, then yes, it does make a huge difference.