Why don't I give out unedited photos?

This is a very sensitive subject for me.

Okay, not really, but really.

I could talk about this topic for hours honestly though. There are a ton of posts online explaining this topic way better than I’m about to and yet, I still want to add my $0.02. This is a policy I will not budge on ever. Despite the amount of people that ask, my position is still not changing.

When you buy a book, do you ask the author to see their drafts?

When you go to a restaurant, do you ask for the ingredients so you can cook the food yourself?

Of course you don’t. It’s not the finished product and isn’t nearly as good as what the finished product is. This is essentially what you are doing when you ask a photographer for their unedited images. Unedited images are drafts — they are incomplete work. I would never give a client something that wasn’t completely finished and worked on for hours.

On the same token, giving out unedited images lends it way to something equally as frustrating: clients editing over your work.

I am usually a pretty even-tempered, hard to anger person but I cannot tell you how frustrating this is for me. Whenever I have a fresh set of photos from a shoot, I spend hours culling through the photos and selecting the best ones, editing and colorgrading on Lightroom and Photoshop, and making sure they are perfect before delivering them to the client. Imagine doing all of this work and feeling proud of yourself and the photos just to see them on Instagram 20 minutes later with a filter slapped on them covering all the work you just put in. Triggering. 😂

Besides the emotional side of editing a photographer’s work, when you change someone’s work, you are effectively misrepresenting them to the public and affecting their future business. If you put a filter on a photo and post it to the world, you tell the world that '“This is the work that Asia delivers” which is inaccurate. I don’t deliver work with Instagram filters on top. Potential clients that see these client-edited photos may say 1 of 2 things:

1) “This photographer is charging money for photos edited with filters? Definitely not booking with her.”

2) “Wow, I want to book with her so I can have photos that look like this!”

Both situations are a lose-lose because 1) I am losing potential clients by them seeing inaccurate representations of my work and 2) I am gaining potential clients expecting Instagram-quality work who will be upset when I don’t deliver images like that.

The point of this post: when looking for a photographer to take your photos, choose one whose style you love that you will not feel the need to edit over (and before you do decide to edit over a photographer’s work, check back over the contract to ensure that you are not breaching the terms of the contract by altering their work!).