So I just had an interesting conversation with someone in the art department for a magazine I did a recent shoot for. This young man, probably an intern, asked me for a RAW file! Now I’m not totally surprised as I’ve heard from a fellow photographer he was asked the same thing by this magazine. The fellow wanted to inquire about getting a larger file than the JPEG I sent. Yeah, like I’m going to let an intern edit my RAW file and run it with my name next to it. No thanks. Now by habit I usually send my clients JPEGS and if they need TIFFs I’m happy to do it. The photos they are running will probably be no more than a quarter page. Somehow this intern thought I just shot JPEG in camera and gave it to him, rather than it having come from a processed RAW. People, there is very little difference in output between a TIFF and 10 or higher quality JPEG. There are some graduations in color that the TIFF does better but according to the UPDIG site, both are acceptable file delivery formats. If you have a JPEG you can still just save it as a TIFF, it doesn’t require a new TIFF from a RAW image. This art department just thinks bigger must be better. A JPEG 9MB file must not be as good as a 30MB TIFF. Well, save the JPEG as a TIFF and voila!
Have any of you conformed to UPDIG? There has been a lot of talk of it in my ASMP chapter and it makes some good points. I think it serves to better educate the photo receivers rather than the photographer, as most of us have been going by their recommended guidelines for quite awhile now. I really like UPDIG’s statement that a photo user should really never ask for a RAW file. The intern tried to tell me that they get the RAWs from photographers. Who of you are doing this? and stop it! Why a photographer would do this is beyond me. As I stated when this request was made of me, I was there, I can best process the image to what my vision of the scene was when I took it and my intention in the finished product. Giving away a RAW image is in essence delivering an unfinished product. Don’t do it!
