Tips for digital printing

[Mystix]

Hi juz wanna share my recent experience with colorlab photofinishing at adelphi.

i sent in a couple of pics for printing at 4r size a few days ago and when i got them back i realize that my pics were not properly cropped as in there's a black strip at the bottom of all the pics.
it turns out that their machine have trouble dealing with images cropped using photoshop 6 or 7. they put this fineprint onto their pricelist paper which i didn't check. but anyway the main thing that i realized was that my colors were way off....the yellows were real saturated and contrast was ultra high....resulting in one of the pics being severely overexposed. i was puzzled coz i didn't think the difference would be so much. i suspected that the pics were edited by themselves. so i then went back to correct the cropped images (a guy advised me to use photoshop 5 or 5.5 to save instead) and send it in again, this time i specifically told the lady this time no editing of the pics.... true enough when i got them back they were so much better this time! obviously they cocked up with the editing for the first batch

so the lesson learnt is ALWAYS ALWAYS tell them to leave ur pics alone when u send them in.

 

[Goondu]

Is it possible that the lab techs goes through a standard procedure of *optimising* your images even without looking at your pics?

 

[zapp!]

I usually make sure that my pics are always in a 3:2 ratio before sending for printing. Also, i save my pics in sRGB color space b4 sending them for print.

 

[Mystix]

Originally posted by zapp!
I usually make sure that my pics are always in a 3:2 ratio before sending for printing. Also, i save my pics in sRGB color space b4 sending them for print.

thats wat i do also....but the problem with colorlab is that the 3:2 or 6:4 format that u've cropped inside ps 6 or 7 is not recognized by their machine....for eg a 1600x1066 is thought to be 1600x1200 . accordingly to the man he says there's an error with the algorithm of ps 6/7 or something. personally i think its more of prob with their machine...i mean there are so many ps 6 and 7 users ard and since adobe did not provide a fix that shouldn't they make their machine to suit us rather than making us use other software to crop or use ps 5 to save. totally inconvenient

 

[Mystix]

Originally posted by Goondu
Is it possible that the lab techs goes through a standard procedure of *optimising* your images even without looking at your pics?

could be.. but that's rather unpro coming from a so called 'pro lab' imho

 

[ckiang]

According to Colour Lab, they do not do anything to digital pictures, they print as-is. You might want to check your files. PS 6/7 embeds ICC profiles into the file, if you do not have your PS setup properly, a wrong/invalid profile might be embedded, and it might confuse the machine.

PS 6 incompatibility with the Frontier machine is quite widely known, not too sure if PS 7 still has the problem. More of a Fuji problem I'd say.

Anyway, aspect ratio doesn't matter. If it's not 3:2 but 4:3, you can choose either to have the 2 white borders, auto-crop top/bottom or print on their special "DI" paper. I've printed hundreds of digital photos in Colour Lab, and zapp! did one big stack of a few hundred at a go, no problems. Even PS converted B&W look excellent.

Regards
CK

 

[Mystix]

hmmm i dun think theres anything wrong coz i juz save a copy of the original files using ps 5 to correct the cropping prob.

 

[zapp!]

I think i saved my files with PS7...np with the printing.

 

[looteer]

when you guys say fujui frontier machines have incompability with PS6/7, does it mean that you guys save the files in native PSD format??

why not in JPG or TIFF (if you don't want further compression)??

:dunno: