Photographer-quality Wedding Album or something else?

I personally wouldn't pay that price for an album.

I would not spend that much.
I ordered a professional album from Shutterfly for 1/3 of that and it’s beautiful quality.

I definitely would never spend that much for an album. NEVER lol

Our photographer charges $1200 for albums, and because our album was included in the photography package, it was discounted to $800. While the quality is absolutely beautiful, if I could do things over again, I probably would have ordered the flush mount album from Artifact Uprising with the leather cover instead, which would have cost around half of what we paid.

No, I wouldn’t; nobody looks at them anymore lol I would use that money and go on vacation!

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Thank you for the recommendation, I will definitely have to look into that. Is Artifact Uprising better quality than other sites like Shutterfly? Is leather definitely better than linen for the cover? Glad to know I am not alone thinking that price is crazy, I don't think I can justify paying that much!

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Yes, I personally think that Artifact Uprising is better quality than Shutterfly. We used Shutterfly to make albums for our parents, and the quality was just fine for that purpose, but I don't think I'd use them for my own wedding album. If you go with Artifact Uprising, I would recommend the leather cover over the linen because it's more durable over time and the embossing on the cover looks more natural (if you want to include your names and wedding date on the cover)

I'm a photographer. I don't photograph weddings but I know how to edit, process, and print images. I ended up making my own albums from the professional print lab I normally use for my prints, using the high res files supplied by our photographer, and they came out beautiful. I designed two 8x8 albums for our parents and one 10x10 album for us, and the total cost for all three was under $500.

Albums from our photographer were gorgeous but cost $1000 and up, and I just didn't want to spend all of that extra money on a book that I'll look at a handful of times a year. Most people look at photos on their devices 99% of the time. Most people do not take out photo albums and look at them regularly. Our friends who have wedding albums say they take them out on their anniversary. I feel like $300-$500 is the most I'd feel comfortable spending on an album. I like that I designed my own because I can reprint them if I ever damage one and because of that, I actually take it out and look at it more because I'm less worried about ruining it.

Many years ago, I did a comparison of print quality (prints, not albums) from various companies and was not impressed with Shutterfly at all. The color reproduction was off, the prints looked muddy, and the quality of the materials was nothing special. I don't have any experience with Artifact Uprising, but they certainly look like they offer a more impressive product, and I considered using them before discovering my own print lab was able to produce high end albums. I think its worth it to spend extra on a beautiful lay flat album with high quality materials and if you make your own album I'd still budget somewhere between $150-$350 to have it professionally printed.

Oh and your photographer saying they would "extra edit" your album photos does sound a little weird, but it's probably not as uncommon as you might think. Most wedding photographers use presets to edit the bulk of your wedding images quickly, but if you were to say you really like some of the images and want to order prints, they might go back over them an do a finer tune edit. For example, it was buggy for our elopement and I have a huge red black fly bite on my shoulder (I tried to cover it with concealer, but it was still visible) and in some images you can clearly see mosquitos on us or in the air. If I ordered a large print of one of those images I would hope that my photographer would have made the extra effort to clone out those pesky bugs, but it would have been really time consuming for her to do it on every single shot, especially if they ended up being ones we didn't like. Also, she wouldn't necessarily know that the red bump on my shoulder was a fly bite and not a birthmark or something. I think that is part of the reason why albums cost so much - because you are paying for hours of enhanced detail editing on hundreds of photos, not just some presets applied quickly in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Also, our photographer supplied us with all the "high res" images via a website, but the high res images she supplied were actually lower resolution than I expected (closer to 3000x4500 pixel, or 13.5 MP images when I was expecting more like 4000x6000 or 24MP+ images). I thought we would get "full res" images but I'm certain these are downsized from the original RAW files. So I'm a bit disappointed in that but again, from a business perspective it would take a lot more time and web space to upload very large full res files vs files that are large enough for web viewing and basic printing needs. And the idea is to get the client to come back and order prints and albums (not to have the client download all the images and then try to print giant wall hangings on their own) and generate even more money as a repeat customer, so I get it, it's just not what I expected. I never asked specifics about the resolution when we booked our photographer, and our contract just says "high res" images with no minimum specs and no mention of "full res" so I just kind of assumed I'd get larger files than we did.

Now, when printing images, there is a slight extra process involved called "soft proofing" which just basically means that you verify that the image will print the way you expect. Often times screens and printers don't have the same profiles or gamut range (colors can appear different and dark and light areas can lose detail), so you soft proof to make small adjustments to the image prior to printing so that the printed image appears the same as the image you see on a screen/device. So it's possible your photographer is referring to that, but it sounds like he just did a quick preset edit and some quick adjustments on all of your photos and then would go over them in finer detail if you paid him more to do so by ordering an album or prints.

If you look through your contract and it states you receive edited images as part of your package, then I would go back to your photographer and say that you expected fully edited images, not a partial edit. For the photographer to claim the images he gave you are "proofs" but to not have that language anywhere in the contract or package seems misleading to me. I think its fair to give that a go and see what he says.

I would never spend that much on a photo album. There are several companies that offer custom wedding albums for significantly less money (Shutterfly, Artifact Uprising, Milk, etc.).

Nope, I wouldn't spend that much on photo album. Firstly, I find this price way too high, and secondly, I don't even like the idea of a hoto album (with the photos being additionaly edited? No, thanks). My photographer is doing digital scrapbooks in Smartshow 3d, so I'm going for it, plus it can be sent to friends and relatives via email. but how do you share the album? Take a picture of it?

I think you can ship around and find something that really fits your price. And remind your photographer you didn’t pay him for proofs lol. My husband and are were originally going for the basic price with our photographer, which included a basic photo album. He assured us that at any time we could come back to him and have portraits or an album made. We got lucky because my angel of a MIL offered to pay for the photographer, and she upgraded our package to include the album. Otherwise those albums would probably have cost just as much as yours. If it wasn’t included in the package, I probably would have used Shutterfly lol.