Conflict of Interest?

I just received an email from a friend/ client of mine:

"I have a photographer's question for you. A friend of mine is the marketing director for a school in Colorado. He is having some issues with a photographer and a designer that work for him. The designer would like the raw, un-touched files for the work they are creating, but the photographer will only provide jpegs or tiffs. The designer says you can manipulate raw files more and would like them that way but the photographer doesn't want to provide those because it will reflect poorly on their work if the photographer doesn't do some retouch. What do you think? This would be my response, unless it's been specified up front that the designer requires the raw files and the photographer expects it, the photographer can refuse to give the raw files. What would you say?"

This was my response:

"It's a tricky situation. I never send out raw images; I don't think I've ever been asked to. The main reason why someone wouldn't want to do it is, like you say, their photos can be made to look bad (unintentionally of course) and that reflects back on the photographer. While I'm shooting, I have certain ideas of how the pictures will look when finished; occasionally that's pretty much as they look when shot, other times it can be quite different. After a shoot, I do a lot of work on each picture to get them to look just the way I had planned when I took the shot. Because it takes time (and expensive software), I usually charge $15 per image for a finished shot. Click here to see some samples of before/ after  pictures, as well as my take on the subject.

I'm assuming this photographer is new to your friend's school; usually this sort of thing would've been talked about beforehand if they wanted the raw images, or if they had certain ideas for how they wanted the finished pictures to look. I would contact the photographer and say, fine, don't give us the raw images, but here's what we want done with them (darken this one, boost the colors on this one, etc). It's not really the designer's job to manipulate the pictures; that's what the photographer is hired for. See if they can work out an amicable arrangement. It sounds more like the designer doesn't trust the photographer to do a good job, which may be the case, but then that's a good reason for them to talk things over before shooting. If the marketing director hired both of them independently, it means he likes both their work– the designer needs to work with what the photographer gives her, and the photographer needs to let the designer use his pictures in the way she best sees fit."

Mike