I've been looking through my wedding photos from 2 years ago and now I am developing a better eye for what is a good and what is a poor photo I can only say I'm so disapointed with them.
Despite the day being a beautiful nright sunny day all the photos look grey and lack any vibrancy. The focus is off on some of them, there are dozens of things I now see in them and am disapointed with.
I have no prints of them but all images on my computer with permission to have any and as many copies made as I want.
Now my question is: if I edit some of the photos (adjust highlights/shadows/contrast/vibrancy and saturation etc) am I breaking a form of etiquette? Would it be very rude of me? I don't plan to take credit for the photos or claim them as my work.
If i consider selling a photo file to someone and then they readjust it i'd feel hurt. However on the other hand I would be ashamed to have provided the photos I now have of the wedding to a customer if I considered myself a professional photographer.
I think that you can do whatever you want to with the copies you have. It was your special day, you should have the pix you would like to have. Sometimes photos have to be tweaked to be printed at their best. :-)
Is the photographer a friend of yours? If they aren't, they may never know about the tweaking anyway. If they are, they may not remember what these 2 yr old files look like.
@5unflow3r the photographer is one of my best friends boyfriends. At the time he was a photographer and charged high rates, we couldn't afford his rate and planned to go with someone else.
He offered to do the same package as we would have received from the other photographer and matched the price.
Unfortunately by the time our wedding rolled around he was focussing on a different career. We had to wait 6 months to even see the images, didn't receive any prints or the album and none of the photos had been edited. Despite this he still was paid, I think to say he had lost any passion or enthusiasm for it would be close to the mark.
From that i've learnt not to mix friends and business but am still left with unsatisfactory images.
If you have the copies, and it's only for your own memories then I can't see that there is any problem with editing them. It's not like you're going to profit from them, you just want the pictures to be as perfect as possible.
If they weren't edited, who's to say your edit would be any different from what he would've done? I say go ahead, he made a commitment and didn't follow through, now that you have enough talent and feel capable, finish what he started. The right way!
Here's a point...if he didn't want you to edit them, he would have sold you prints, not the actual computer files. And after reading the history of the event, he probably doesn't care. Sounds like he has moved on from photography
I think you're fine since you paid him full price, which would normally include post-processing anyways, and he didn't take the time to do that.
Having said that, a friend of mine recently posted photos from a professional shoot on facebook and she had taken it upon herself to do a bit of tweaking on. When the photographer spotted the tweaked versions on fb he wrote a comment on the album saying "What has happened to these photos?!"
I gathered from that that he wasn't happy, but then, the photos were very well done in the first place, didn't need tweaking, and she posted them without giving any photo credit to him. (Which I'm assuming he wouldn't want after the tweaking she had done to them).
I think if you paid for them, and they're sitting on your computer, I think you are perfectly entitled to do what you wish with them :) They're your photos, your memories - I think that in this case, what *you* want is more important than possibly offending a photographer who will never even find out that you modified them!
After reading your full story, I would say that you paid for a product that you never really got and because of his approach, I reckon those photos are yours to do with what you want.
Yes, I think it's perfectly okay to do as you please. You paid for them with an agreement that you can use them basically how you like. So long as you're not passing them totally off as your own then it's fine. You waited far too long to even see them (bad etiquette on his part...!) and it was your special day, so go ahead - I would!
If he ever notices, you can go with the line, I was practicing my editing skills and wanted to use photos of a professional quality so I could ensure that I really understood what made a great picture. Hopefully you like what I have done to them.
Since they are so special, I'd even consider paying a professional to edit them. Chances are extremely thin anyone other than possibly your parents and children will ever show any interest in seeing your wedding photos again, so I wouldn't worry about offending the photographer.
As long as you are not selling his photos to someone else for your own financial gain you are not violating any copyright laws or committing an etiquette faux pas. You paid for the digital files, now they're yours to do with as you please. So you can download them and edit them to your heart's content. He has his money, so what happens to them now is out of his hands.
Tweets ahoy!
Join the Group
Pin With Me
Is the photographer a friend of yours? If they aren't, they may never know about the tweaking anyway. If they are, they may not remember what these 2 yr old files look like.
He offered to do the same package as we would have received from the other photographer and matched the price.
Unfortunately by the time our wedding rolled around he was focussing on a different career. We had to wait 6 months to even see the images, didn't receive any prints or the album and none of the photos had been edited. Despite this he still was paid, I think to say he had lost any passion or enthusiasm for it would be close to the mark.
From that i've learnt not to mix friends and business but am still left with unsatisfactory images.
Having said that, a friend of mine recently posted photos from a professional shoot on facebook and she had taken it upon herself to do a bit of tweaking on. When the photographer spotted the tweaked versions on fb he wrote a comment on the album saying "What has happened to these photos?!"
I gathered from that that he wasn't happy, but then, the photos were very well done in the first place, didn't need tweaking, and she posted them without giving any photo credit to him. (Which I'm assuming he wouldn't want after the tweaking she had done to them).