Photos printing services - disappointing results

[DrunkenZombiee]

Recently the family have been asking for printouts of the photos I have taken for both events and some landscapes and wildlife photos. In which case I have given them the JPG and TIFF files (converted using Canon software) and they have got them printed from mainly supermarket printing services and a couple of online ones.

Having seen the pictures after they have been printed I have to say I am very disappointed with the results as the colours are dark and faded and a few of the photos (taken in very dark surroundings) it hard to make out the features in the photo. I use Adobe RGB on my monitor at home when editing or just viewing photos and it appears that whatever printing systems have been used seem to be horribly mismatched. I am happy to calibrate my monitor to match a printing services gamut if needed.

Short of buying a couple of grand printer can anyone recommend a good printing service that doesn't seem to vary as wildly so I can print photos for the family.

It would also be nice to print some canvases at some stage as I have some nice nature shots =).

Thanks in advance.

DZ.

[smilodon]

I think your problem is that you're sending images out with an embedded Adobe RGB profile. The commercial printers being used (Asda, Tesco, Jessops etc) cannot hope to reproduce such a wide range of colours. So they give up and you end up getting a mess. Therefore most high street printing services ask for sRGB profiles and match their printers to that. They work on the basis that 90% of the images they receive will have come from point and shoot compact camera's which almost always default to the sRGB colour space. Also it's quite likely that any image you provide to family and friends will be looked at on a monitor. Monitors work in the sRGB colour space as well so this is another plus for providing images in sRGB. They look good on a monitor and they are what the printer is expecting.
My advice would be to work on images in Adobe RGB to produce your preferred master edits. Then open the image up in the sRGB colour space and re-edit. Save this as a print version and send that out to your family, friends and printers.

If you want to get really precise about things then find a decent commercial printer and ask them to provide you with a colour profile for their printer. If you use that you will be confident that what you see on the screen is basically what you'll get on a printed image.

Finally none of this will work unless you make sure you have a calibrated monitor. Without that you'll never be sure that what your monitor is showing you is actually what your software is rendering. You might have a dark underexposed image in your software but if your screen brightness is cranked up too high then the dark image will appear nice and bright. Only when you print it or view it on a calibrated monitor will it reveal itself to be underexposed. So buy a Color Munki or Datacolor Spyder calibrator.

Finally the sad truth is most people don't ever calibrate their monitors. So we can never be exactly sure that what we produce will be viewed on a monitor that is properly reproducing our image.

For on-line stuff I use Snapfish and send everything as sRGB. For one off prints I use a local printer. I have her printer profiles but find that anything printed in sRGB looks as close to how I want as makes no difference.

[DrunkenZombiee]

As the Mrs wants me to enter some photos into comps and print a load of photos on canvases, I am thinking of reluctantly thinking about stumping up the cash for a proper calibration tool (hopefully it will make a difference).

I will be looking to calibrate at least my 2 PC's and my laptop but not too sure which calibration tool would fit my needs. I would like all devices to be comparable to one another in terms of colourspace however it will be unlikely for the laptop that I would use a ambient light sensor.

I am looking to pay as little as possible for something that does the job.

Any suggestions? I have had a look at the ones suggested but they come in different flavors.

Photography is starting to become an expensive hobby!

Thanks.

DZ.

[smilodon]

I only use datacolor and for multiple monitors you will need the spyder elite pro.

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

[DrunkenZombiee]

Ouch £125 !!!!

That is a lot of money!

[smilodon]

If you can live with a single monitor being calibrated then the Spyder Express will work nicely.