When we think of a wedding photo album, we usually think of the usual record-album sized scrapbook with pages of pages of photographs lovingly displayed. But a digital wedding photo album is a little different. First off, a digital wedding photo album is put together by a digital camera and computer program (usually PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro) and then exists only as computer information as opposed to negatives and stills.
Disadvantages
The main disadvantage of a digital wedding photo album is that it doesn’t look all that impressive. You can’t actually hold it and pass it around like a traditional wedding photo album. When you receive a digital wedding photo album from your photographer, it’s usually just a CD in a protective case. You can usually select some individual stills to be made into prints or a smaller version of the traditional wedding album, but that will cost extra (depending on the photographer).
Advantages
For most couples and for professional photographers, there are far more advantages to digital wedding photo albums than disadvantages. It’s far easier to make copies when you’re capturing digital photography wedding images by a digital camera than by a film camera. You merely need your printer and special photography print “paper” in order to make copies. You can even skip that and just email images to your loved ones and exes.
Another advantage is that your digital wedding photo album is safer than a traditional wedding photo album. Because the images are all stored by computer, you can make many back up copies. This is harder to do with traditional print film. If your wedding album is ever destroyed, you have to cross your fingers and hope the photographer you used is not only still in business, but has kept all of the negatives.
It’s also far easier to add any effects with a digital image than with a traditional print film. Basic effects could include getting rid of glare spots, red-eyes or cropping the image to make an overall better composition. Even more spectacular effects include translating the images into sepia tones, to blend a series of images into just one photo or to give your photo borders and frames.
In conclusion, it’s much easier and usually much more economic to go with a digital wedding photo album than a traditional film album. Always be sure to ask your photographer if there is a way to combine both, because you never know how desperate he is for business that he’ll cut you a deal.