had a weird situation last week. did a commercial shoot for a small construction company, was for their website and some marketing materials. everything went fine, delivered the edited package, they were happy. then like two days later they emailed asking if they could also have the raw DNG files because their in-house designer wanted to do their own edits.

i kind of didnt know what to say. i've never had this come up before. on one hand the raws are just sitting on my drive and it feels petty to withhold them. on the other hand i've heard other photogs say you never give out raws because it's unprofessional or something. i ended up just saying i'd think about it and get back to them which was awkward.

do you guys have a policy on this or does it just depend on the client. i dont have anything in my contract about it one way or another which is probably the real problem here.

add it to your contract and never give raws for free, that's the short version. the longer version is that raw files are essentially your working negatives and handing them over means someone else can slap whatever edit they want on your footage and potentially put your name on it, or worse put something out that looks terrible and you have no control over it.

what i do is offer raw files as an add-on, i charge about 40% on top of the package price for it. most clients don't take it but occasionally someone does and it's easy money. the key thing is having it written into your service agreement from the start so it's not a weird conversation after the fact. for this particular client i'd just explain politely that raw files aren't part of the standard deliverables but you can offer them for an additional fee, frame it as a service not a refusal and most people are totally fine with it.

honestly i gave raws to a client once early on just because i felt bad saying no and i kind of regretted it, they used a really heavy handed edit and posted it everywhere and it just looked nothing like my work. not a disaster or anything but it was annoying to see. never did it again without charging extra.

also side note ? definitely sort out your contracts before the next job, even a basic one page agreement covers so much stuff and saves you these awkward back and forths. there are some decent templates floating around in the drone photography communities if you dont want to pay a lawyer to draft something from scratch.