Slightly technical JPEG resolution/digital camera question

RAW for printing

No decent wedding photographer should be shooting in lossy JPEG.

However using histographs etc to fine tune settings quickly is what makes dSLRs good for weddings etc a good photographer should be able to use both.

16x20" at 300dpi = 4800x6000 pixels

TIFFs fine, really, I think

8x10? inches, mm, cm? metres?

sorry - I'm ranting, its just that my mate is a photographer and she manages fine with jpgs, she barely uses photoshop as most of her prints only require cropping. She prints on A4 size max, and there is absoloutely no loss in quality.

I'm wondering what size this thread questioner is referring to though. Poster size, yes I'd agree jpg would be unsuitable.

(this is actually a good litmus test)

tracer, we're still at the point of signing the contract with the photographer, and trying to get some of these details in the contract.

the package that we're getting is digital-only, so not your typical wedding deal. we'll be printing our own prints and books from the images that they give us, which is why this is such a big deal. we're both just wary of being in a situation where we go to print out photos following the wedding and end up with crappy grainy prints because we weren't clear about what we want.

the couple that we've been talking to doesn't want to send out the images straight out of the camera, they want to do some post-production on select images before sending them to us.

not sure if that clarifies things for people or not.

This is doubly important if they are shooting in jpeg because shoot-process-compress-process- compress is not a great workflow for optimal prints at the end.

haha, i spose wedding planners naturally have to worry about everything!

300dpi is the standard dpi for printing - that's what your local lab running a Fuji Frontier or Noritsu machine will output at, and basically what a good photo printer is capable of (Epson R2400, the HP) etc..

It wouldn't hurt to request all the files in TIFF format on CD/DVD - that's the basic equivalent of a wedding photographer handing you the negatives when he's done. He'll probably charge you more, just as a photographer - just like in the film days, the wedding people made their money selling prints.

I would expect a wedding photographer to either be using a Nikon or Canon pro outfit - the d200 outputs at ~10.2mp, the Canon 5d at 12.8. Both should make excellent prints up to 11x14, and with a little work are acceptable up to 16x20. The higher-end models (D2x, 1D blah blah blah) will do a little bit better.

you can get jpegs that are terrible for printing. choose a quantization setting that's too low and they'll look like shit (it's a lossy format and you can make it TOO lossy). that said, a professional photographer should be using the highest of all settings and have a big enough memory card to cope.

it also depends on what you're photographing - water and smoke and subtle things can look terrible - my tivo really struggles with footage of swimming pools even on the highest setting. and hard edged things look terrible as the dct technique it uses isn't good at big changes of contrast.

(is all of this telling me that we're being stupid going with a digital photographer and we should reconsider all the 'old fashioned' film photographers that i automatically vetoed off our list?)

stet, we're avoiding the traditional route and advertised on craigslist for someone to work in our price range and giving us digital images at the end...had almost 100 responses in the end, at least half were worth looking twice at their websites. but nobody on the shortlist will be trying to sell us prints at the end of the day.