As well as providing all your wedding photographs as high resolution jpegs, I offer all clients the RAW files of their wedding photographs at an additional flat price of £50. Alternatively, I offer a 20% discount to couples who don’t want me to provide colour corrected jpegs of there wedding photos, and just want me to provide the RAW, untouched image files straight from the camera.

Most London wedding photographers, and indeed professional photographers more generally, point blank refuse to provide RAW files. And I totally appreciate why they only want you to see a properly colour corrected and finished image. But the way I see it, you have paid me to capture images that will remain important to you forever, so giving you the RAW files is a genuinely meaningful way of providing you with timeless wedding photographs (for all the wedding photographers that claim to provide you with timeless wedding photos, I would urge them to also let you have your RAW files if they really mean what they say!)

So what are RAW files? Here’s a short explainer.

What are RAW files?

• The short answer is that the RAW files are basically the pure untouched 'digital negatives’ of your photos. They are the uncompressed digital files, containing every pixel that was captured, and without any post-production. They are the raw materials for you to create beautiful, creative images in exactly the style you want.

Benefits of having the RAW files of your wedding photos

• The RAW files are untouched and ’straight out of the camera’, so they don’t have any exposure correction or styling applied to them. They are the ‘pure’ digital data. This means that every detail that was captured by the camera is there and untainted.

• With RAW files you can create another colour/style anytime you want (as long as you have some basic image editing software). Whereas jpegs don’t give you anywhere near as much flexibility. So, for example, if I give you your photos as black and white jpegs, you can’t now put colour back into those files. The colour is gone. Whereas, with the RAW files, you can create new, stylised colour versions, Polaroid-style or anything else, from this underlying digital negative. So, the RAW file is extremely versatile and malleable.

• Working with RAW files is easy and fun! As long as you have some image editing software, it’s really really easy to create new and stylish looks to your photos.

• While you can try to make adjustments to the colour-corrected jpegs I provide you, editing an already compressed jpeg file creates a lot of visible noise and digital artefacts, and the results will look pretty awful compared to making adjustments using the uncompressed and richer RAW file.

• There’s also an emotional aspect to this. Your wedding photos will capture important memories for the rest of your lives. But the jpegs that I or any other wedding photographer give you will be, by their very nature, be compressed and ‘fixed’ to a particular look - which might look really dated in 10 years time. That dated look to wedding photos can be amazing (if your parents got married in the 70s, you’ll know what I mean). But wedding photos can also date really badly (if your parents got married in the 80s, you’ll know what I mean). So, having the RAW files means you can re-output your images in 10-20 years in an aesthetic that either enhances and better reflects your memories of the look and feel of your day, or overcomes what might look like a badly dated look that seemed cool circa 2026, but looks cringe in 2046.

Drawbacks of having the RAW files

There are to my mind, only two minor disadvantages:

• Because they are uncompressed, they have a lot more image data than jpegs, so RAW files are very large. Each file can easily be 25-50mb in size. Across 400 or so photos, that’s going to take up around 10-20gb of storage. And I would strongly recommend that you back them up - on a hard drive and/or on at least two memory sticks. Memory sticks are cheap, so it will only cost you an extra tenner or so, to create two further back ups. So, I don’t see this as a real drawback.

• You need photo editing software like Photoshop or Lightroom to work with RAW files. But there are also much cheaper and even free photo editors that mean that you can easily edit your RAW files, so again, this isn’t much of a drawback.