As a professional photographer, I only work with a color calibrated camera and monitor when I shoot/edit your photos. What does this mean? Well, it means that the way my monitor is displaying the photos is showing to my eye the closest possible match to what it looked like in real life, as well as the way the camera photographed it. Color calibration starts with the first photo at your session. I will calibrate my camera to the lighting in the area we are shooting (in studio vs outdoors for example). This will tell the camera was the true colors are when capturing a photograph. Essentially... whites look white, reds look red, blues look blue, and thus skin tones look natural and real to true life. I'm sure you've experienced a slightly blue or yellow tint to your own photos or tv monitors at some point or another to be able to relate to how this would be an issue for a professional photographer! The second phase is during the edit. Through the editing process, I have a professional color calibrated monitor to be sure that when I slightly adjust the yellow or blues of your photograph by 1-2% to make it just perfect, what I see is actually correct. If the monitor is tinted improperly to yellow, red, blue or green... then your skin tones will have that color cast as well. What does this mean for you? It means that you can trust my color when you get your photos printed. Now that you have your digital files, the responsibility to print the images with quality is in your hands. Don't be alarmed, this isn't difficult to do. Just follow the steps below and you'll have amazing prints, as close to my professional lab as I can hope for you to get!
1. Do not adjust color according to your monitor. If you have photoshop or any editing software, please do not edit the files in any way.
2. Do not add filters from your phone or any editing software. (Including instagram please! I spent a long time meticulously editing the color, exposure and contrast of your photos, I prefer it is not downgraded with filters)
3. Be aware that if the photos look too blue, red, green etc on your monitor, its likely your monitor and not the photos.
4. Use a quality lab. We suggest mpix.com for the best quality. Do not use a one hour photo lab like walmart, walgreens etc.
Finally, Remember to back up your images. You are responsible as well for keeping your digital files safe. Here are a few tips on how to do that!
1. Download your files from the link we send you, and move from your downloads folder to a safe location on your hard drive. Or, if you purchased a flash drive, copy the files from that flash drive to a location on your computer's hard drive.
2. Do not adjust the quality, DPI, size, etc of the photographs in any programs.
3. Run a backup copy of the files to a second location NOT ON THE SAME HARD DRIVE. I suggest an external hard drive. You should then have your photos on your computer drive as well as an external drive (double backup).
4. Consider also backing up your files to a cloud server for storage.
5. You can also consider backing up your photos to a device like a flash drive and keeping it in a different physical location (family member's home, office/work, etc) or placing in a fire proof safe.
