Printable View
I ordered some Christmas cards at costco but they came out way to dark. I told them that my monitor was calibrated but they said I needed to have the correct printer profile. I went to drycreekphoto.com and downloaded the correct profile and then I installed it. What do I do from here? Is it supposed to change the way my monitor looks or how does have to do with the photo when I export it with that particular profile. Just confused.
Any ideas, I need to get the Christmas Cards out!
thx
metakephotos...
I've noticed the same problem with my 'rig'. The images look great on the 'panel', but once printing has been initiated, the images come out darker than I would like. I've also gone as far as adjusting the brightness of the printouts via the printer driver to no avail. Hopefully someone can explainthis in a language that I can understand!
[*-)]
I know that Walgreens and Walmart's photo processing does an "Auto Enhancing" step that adjusts both color and contrast to "optimize" images. They do so on all images unless told to do otherwise. The Auto Enhancing seems to work well on things like point-and-shoot
images. Most customers don't notice the adjustment, and think the
prints look great when processed at that particular retailer. Unfortunately, it really screws with people who do their own adjustments at home. It's likely Costco does something similar. Therefore, whenever you have your images printed by a chain retailer, you must contact them and ask them to turn off all auto corrections.
However, even with all their auto corrections off, what you see on your screen won't exactly look like what gets printed. However, it'll give you a base to work from so that you can make small adjustments on your monitor to mimic the retail printing and, therefore, achieve results that are more predictable and consistent.
Meta--
I've banged my head against the colorspace
wall. The printing service I use now doesn't require it, but the way I
found before I used them was the proofing option in photoshop. It's
under the view menu. You should be able to proof the images through their profile. I might be wrong, and there really might be a better way, but this worked for me.
I say save yourself the headache and print at mpix.com. Their Kodak prints are all done on optical printers, which means there's no ink to worry about, and they're shockingly cheap.
Let us know what you figure out!