CD Image from Photographer vs. Negatives - Any Difference?

[splendid]

We had our wedding in July and I didn't buy the album from the photographer (we hired a professional photographer to take the pics). The package we got included a CD of our wedding pictures and a proof book. I have read some of the posts here advising couples to request for the negatives from the photographers. My question is this: Is there a difference btw what was given to us in the CD and the negatives? If i wanted to make a "professional" album, can I use the CD pictures?

Thanks.

PS: What is photoshop?

[rincon777]

Yes, there is a difference. If your photographer used film and had the negative/images scanned they can be lower quality. We have had to re-scan some of our images because of poor quality. Also, how high is the resolution of photos from your photographer? Ours only gave us images large enough to made 8x10 of digital images and 4x6 of film images.

[splendid]

i don't think she scanned them 'cos the quality seems good enough. I don't know aobut resolutions (how do I determine what the resolution is). I opened one of the pictures and the measurement is: 3504 x 2336 (not sure what this means either)

[Rachel0814p]

If your photographer shot using a digital camera and not a film camera, then the images on your CD are the negatives. Negatives from a film camera are on strips of film or on slides, depending on how the photographer develops the film.

To answer your question, 3504x2336 is the pixel size of the digital image. When you view something on your computer monitor, you're actually viewing "pixels" of colored light that make up all of the images you see. Pixels are virtual units of measurement the way inches or centimeters are real life units of measurement.

There's a lot to explain regarding what is "high resolution", but I'll try to make it easy and short so as not to bore you: With a digital image, the higher the pixel count, the more image data within the image file. Theoretically, the more data an image has, the higher its resolution is meaning you get a crisper, sharp picture with good print quality. The image needs to be high resolution in order to print out on paper and look good.

The file size of a high resolution ("hi-res") image should be fairly high. A hi-res color image should be somewhere between 2-10MB (the more colors there are in an image, the higher the file size). Hi-res B/W images have smaller file sizes than color images (because the lack of color requires less data), but a high res B/W image is usually never less than 1MB.

Digital images are either hi-res for printing or lo-res for web viewing. The web requires images to load quickly, so web size (or lo-res) images have to be small files and don't afford the amount of data necessary to product a nice, clear print.
If you've ever printed a picture off of a website, it looks great on the screen but it prints out really crappy because there isn't a lot of data within the image to allow it to print out crisp and clean.

From the measurement you mentioned (3504x2336) it sounds like your images are hi-res images. If the file sizes look pretty big, and the image looks large and crisp when viewing at 100%, then you should be good to go. If the file sizes are small and pixelated when printed at a standard photo size (like 4x6 or 8x10) then you don't have hi-res images.

HOPE THAT HELPS!! :)