Your digital files, explained.

What lands in your hands, and what it is not.

A delivery is a link and a password. Behind them sits a private gallery holding your finished images, retouched by hand, ready to download and share. Everything in there has already been through the part of the work you do not see: selecting, correcting, and the slow hand pass over the frames that made the cut.

It helps to know what a gallery is not. It is not a contact sheet of everything the camera recorded, and it is not the working material an editor keeps. It is the finished work in the form you are meant to use. If you want the argument for why the finishing matters as much as the sitting, the complete guide to professional headshots takes it end to end.

How many images, in which crops and at which sizes, is a planning question rather than a universal one. It follows from where the pictures are going, which is why that conversation happens on the phone instead of on a web page. If you are still deciding what a sitting ought to produce in the first place, start with what a headshots session is built to give you.

A finished photograph, not a negative.

Cameras used at professional level normally record a RAW capture, which is undeveloped material rather than a picture. No contrast curve, no color rendering and no sharpening have been applied to it yet, which is why an unprocessed capture looks flat and dull on a screen. It is not meant to be looked at. It is meant to be developed.

The delivered image is the developed result. Exposure and color are set, skin is worked by hand, and the frame is cropped on purpose. That is why finished images are the normal deliverable almost everywhere in portraiture: they are the photograph, and the capture behind them is raw material. Whether any given photographer releases originals as well varies from one studio to the next, so ask directly rather than assuming it either way. The mechanics of the two formats sit in RAW and JPEG explained.

One practical consequence follows from that. A finished image is finished. It has been sharpened and compressed for use, so it does not enjoy being edited, saved and compressed again and again. Treat the copy you download as your master and do every crop on a duplicate.

Two sets of files, and which is which.

A gallery often holds more than one version of the same photograph: a full-size set meant for enlargement and print, and a smaller set prepared for the web. On a screen they look identical, and they are not interchangeable. If both are offered, take both and keep them in separate folders, because mixing them is how a thumbnail ends up at a printer.

• The full-size version is the one that survives a crop, an enlargement or a print.
• The web-sized version is the one you upload, since it loads faster and looks the same at that scale.
• Open two or three from each set afterward, to confirm they arrived whole rather than half written.
• Keep any crops you make later out of both folders, so the delivered files stay the obvious ones.

Timing matters more than it sounds. Take the whole set down at the largest size offered, on a computer rather than a phone, on the day the link arrives. A phone download has a habit of handing you a screen-sized copy, and a gallery is a delivery rather than a place to leave things.

One master copy, in two places.

Everything after the download is ordinary housekeeping, which is exactly why it never gets done. The rule that saves people is short: keep one untouched master copy, work only on duplicates, and keep the master in two places, one of them not inside your house.

Untouched means untouched. Do not crop it, do not run it through an app, do not let a phone gallery quietly recompress it while it syncs. Every crop, filter and re-save spends a little quality you cannot get back, and the master is the thing you will return to when a printer, a designer or a conference organiser asks for something specific.

The full routine, including what to keep, where to keep it and when to check it still opens, is in archiving your photos. Do the short version today: one folder, two locations, no edits to the originals.

Name the folder, name the files.

A photograph you cannot find is a photograph you do not have. Give the folder your name and the year, and give the images something a stranger could read: your name, the look, the crop. Anything beats the string of digits a camera hands out.

• Folder: your name, the year, the kind of session.
• File: your name, then what it is, such as the dark jacket look or the wide crop.
• A separate subfolder for the smaller copies you actually upload.
• Working crops kept out of the master folder, so the originals stay obvious.

Names matter more than they look, because they follow the picture onto your website, where a descriptive name and honest alt text quietly help the page they sit on. That five-minute job has its own guide: naming your headshot files before you upload them.

The same file, in two different rooms.

An image does not have one fixed appearance. A screen makes a picture by emitting light. A print makes one by reflecting light off paper, which is a duller starting point than a lit panel however good the paper is. That is why a print can look heavier and less vivid than the version you approved on a bright laptop late at night, with nothing wrong with either one.

Color has a similar catch. Images meant for screens are prepared in sRGB, the color space browsers and phones assume. Presses work in CMYK ink, which cannot reach some of the blues and greens a screen can emit. Sending the wrong one is the most common reason a photo prints flat or a web upload looks oddly gray. The explanation is in the difference between sRGB and CMYK, and the reasons a print never quite equals a screen are in screen and print color.

The practical version is one sentence. If somebody asks for a file to print, do not send the one you pulled off your own website.

Ask the awkward questions early.

Almost every file emergency is the same emergency. Somebody needs a size, a crop or a format at short notice, and the person who could produce it is being asked at the worst possible moment. It is easy to avoid by asking while nobody is under pressure.

• Room around your head in at least one frame, since a banner or a printed layout cannot invent space that a tight crop removed.
• A version you can forward to a designer or a printer without a further exchange about formats.
• Which copy goes where, so a web-sized picture never ends up in a print job.
• What is possible later, if a use appears that nobody planned for.

Those are conversations rather than policies, and they differ from one photographer to another. Mine happen on the phone, along with everything else that depends on your particular set of uses, including what the investment covers for the session you have in mind. Once the files are yours and you are deciding where each one belongs, work through where to use them everywhere, one place at a time.