When a photographer captures an image on a digital camera, this is just the start of the process. The image in the camera is by no means a finished product. Just as an image captured on film or transparency needs to be processed and printed, with all the colour corrections, densities and contrasts adjusted at the printing or scanning stage, so a digital image needs the same corrections carried out before it is ready to be published. And no less important, a caption needs to be electronically added for the picture to have any use if it is for PR issue.
Many photographers have made the switch to digital from film without realising that digital files need these adjustments. They're happy to shoot jpeg files, burn the files to CD and hand it to the client as a fait accompli, either expecting the client to perform some black magic to make the photos look right or believing they look fine because that's what the camera decided was best. What is most worrying about this is that no two digital cameras produce the same result, so without professional intervention, how can the images be perfect? Also, digital cameras are very prone to dust on their sensors, and this shows as black blobs and hairs on the image which need to be digitally removed. I clean my camera chip regularly, and still get occasional marks on images, but I remove them before delivery.
In addition to the colour corrections and cleaning mentioned above, digital images always come off the camera at 72dpi (dots per inch), which matches the resolution of your computer screen. So the image resolution needs to be adjusted according to the end use. Typically 72dpi for web use, 150-200dpi for newspaper use and 300dpi for glossy magazine and corporate printed material. This upsizing, also known as interpolation, needs to be done using professional software to retain as much quality as possible because while you may need a higher resolution, you may want the image size (known as canvas size) to remain the same, be smaller or larger than the original. Digital photos which are not resized properly and with care can look pixelly, or like photos taken off the television.
Just as in the days of film when a client had to budget for film processing and printing costs, they must now consider the post-production costs of digital. This might be a cost-per-image, or a time rate (typically £15 per image or £100 per hour). This should be negotiated on a job-by-job basis as each assignment will have different requirements, and a greater or lesser number of images will be required. But if a photographer offers to dump all the files straight onto CD and hand them over, do not expect any great quality. They may look fine on your office computer screen, but the quality will show at the printing stage, by which time it's too late.
It's worth noting that many photos sent to picture desks are deleted for simply failing to meet minimum quality criteria (as many as one in four according to a recent survey). So why skimp at the post-production stage when you've already paid perhaps hundreds of pounds for the original photoshoot?
If you would like to know more about picture compressions and their effects on quality, please see the JPEG Guide.
Thanks to Tim Gander for producing this guide. © Tim Gander 2005. All rights reserved. This guide may be reproduced for personal and educational purposes only.