Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

waterbuck · Jul 1, 2003, 11:20 PM

Hi

I recently took a whole bunch of photos of my newborn son using a 3.0 Megapixel Pentax optio-S. The shots look great in the iPhoto program.

I don't have a color digital printer and I would be happiest getting the printing done elsewhere. The print service in iPhoto (Kodak) is $0.99/print, which seemed a bit too pricey.

I tried 2 services, Sony imagestation (www.imagestation.com) and a local Ritz photo store. The resulting 4x6 prints look dark and muddy.

The Ritz store has a little Fuji/Aladdin print station where you can edit the image and print out a sheet (3 4x6 photos) for $9. As an experiment, I printed several images, editing them on the station until they matched the beautiful images on my laptop screen, which I brought with me. In almost every case, I need to add 1-3 points of brightness, and 0-2 points of contrast (who knows what the actual units are). At that point, the image on the Aladdin station matched the one on my Powerbook, and the resulting prints looked just fine.

I asked the Ritz storeworkers if they could bump up the Brightness and Contrast a modest amount in order to process my 100-picture CD, and they said they are way too busy to do anything like that.

As best I can tell, the images that look great on my TiBook, in iPhoto, are consistently going to look dark on the systems used by commercial processors.

What should I do?

I have considered trying to hand-edit each image using either iPhoto itself or GraphicConverter. To do that realistically, I would somehow need to recalibrate the screen on my TiBook so I could see the original images as sort of mudy and dark (then I could edit to produce a nice-looking image, as opposed to editing to make images that look overly-bright and washed out on my screen), but I am not sure how to do that.

Any suggestions?

ARe there any services that will make a slight brightness/contrast adjustment (uniformly, ie not shot by shot), as part of printing up the picture?

On the Daily Show, I saw one reporter handle his problem with getting good prints from a computer by using a crude "digital-to-analog conversion device." This entailed pointing a Polaroid photo-camera at his computer screen and taking a picture. Right now, that feels like the way to go.

mixin visuals · Jul 1, 2003, 11:49 PM

thats why crt monitors, even while they look to becoming obsolete, are a requirement for print jobs requiring more color matching.

i never had a problem with my g3 laptop giving such a problem, but lcd's are known for not representing with exact color matching.

maybe recalibrate and colorsync and make sure you have your end of the action as close as possible, and then the rest, unfortunately is on them.

i would pay 60 bucks and get a printer that would do just as good honestly

alphamatrix · Jul 2, 2003, 12:51 AM

Hmm, well you would think that If you just gave them the raw files from the digital camera they should print out reasonably well. Anyway, I think its more a printer problem than that of your TiBooks LCD, I mean the photos look fine on the cameras LCD viewer too don't they? And they'll prolly look just fine on a CRT.

mixin visuals · Jul 2, 2003, 01:28 AM

Originally posted by alphamatrix:
Hmm, well you would think that If you just gave them the raw files from the digital camera they should print out reasonably well. Anyway, I think its more a printer problem than that of your TiBooks LCD, I mean the photos look fine on the cameras LCD viewer too don't they? And they'll prolly look just fine on a CRT.

doesn't work that way unfortunately

gadster · Jul 2, 2003, 09:31 AM

Ask them to email you their printer profile and convert to profile in photoshop. That oughta do it. Sounds like they are printing at windows gamma.

andi*pandi · Jul 2, 2003, 09:43 AM

gadster sounds right.

or try http://www.snapfish.com.

cheaper than some, and I've had decent results.

waterbuck · Jul 3, 2003, 12:24 AM

Hi
Can I convert to printer profile using "Photoshop Elements" or do I need to purchase the whole kit and kaboodle?

Can this be done with the free Graphic Converter?

gadster · Jul 3, 2003, 09:33 AM

Originally posted by waterbuck:
Hi
Can I convert to printer profile using "Photoshop Elements" or do I need to purchase the whole kit and kaboodle?

Can this be done with the free Graphic Converter?

ColoUr management is a big topic, and full of shonks. Do some research on the net and you will see.

You might be better off using the more expensive service for now. It's your first child, right? At least see if KODAK do a better job. When you are 75, and getting all nostalgic - looking at the prints of your young'uns - you are hardly going to be remembering they cost you a few extra bucks. Sheesh.

MikeM33 · Jul 4, 2003, 05:03 AM

I've been in the graphics field for almost 7 yrs now. It's always been my experience that what you see on screen is NOT what you will get from a print, unless you do some serious color calibration. You can have the best printer, monitor, computer, software set-up but your colors will almost always appear different in a print-out. Usually they will print darker than what you see on your monitor, even on a CRT monitor.

MikeM

godzookie2k · Jul 4, 2003, 11:25 AM

ditto, paper counts, kind of printer counts, in my experience cannons print a little redder, especially the lasers, and epsons tend to print a little saturated. if you are sending stuff out to a photo place to do the printing for you, I wouldn't expect them to do any color calibration for you, I know I wouldn't. If you know you need to pump the brightness a bit on each photo do it first and then send it off, you don't really need to recalibrate your monitor, if you know how much to pump it, it might not look right on screen, but if it prints closer to right..well...