I balance my monitors using a program called Spyder. It's just fun! OK the reason for a test print are the chemicals can be new, old, wrong mixtures, or the actual printer sucks.Īs far as the monitor goes most of my images actually look better from assorted labs. Why, you may be wondering! Well it a secret! Walgreens usually use Agfa from the experiences and their locations. However you need to do this check everytime. When I get the 1 pic back almost always they look great. Then I will go around the store and check out the sales deals. Well at Christmas time I send out about 75 to 100 cards 4X6. Unfortunately there's no pay-back for this, so it probably won't ever happen. It would be interesting to do a large-scale survey of some chains by using custom color targets. (If correction is done, nothing will match what a professional color corrector can do, at least for portrait work.) But in prinicple, in the best case, they should be able to match the quality of a "good lab," for straight up, uncorrected image files. I've never used one of the cheap labs, so I can't say for sure how good or bad they are. For example, for those who had better results with a good lab, they were not clear if those labs handled color corrections for them, or possibly fixed a misassigned color profile. I didn't intend to defend the "cheap labs," but I don't think a solid case has been made against them. Gary, the automated cranking of red hues would most likely be from an auto-correction routine - you need to be able to disable such handling. The print quality is usually low, and they often automate the cranking of red hues for skin tone. It's more likely that Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, et. Such is not the case, so I've purposed to ensure I have a supply of ink and decent paper on hand. I was hoping to be able to use the drugstores for fast prints of reasonable quality. And a heck of a lot better than the drugstores. If, however, using the same source image, I push the quality up to the highest (best) setting and print on premium glossy paper I can get output that looks just as good as Shutterfly. I can produce comparable results on my home Epson using a standard print quality. At the cheap outlets they don't push for the highest quality. Colors match and and the prints look great (compared to Walgreens, etc).Īnother factor is how much ink is used to produce the print. How do I know? I've had prints and books made through Shutterfly and Adorama, and they arrive looking exactly like the screen image. I've also had this latter problem with VistaPrint. I'm going to disagree with this statement. So which one is wrong? (or both?) Since the Walgreen's printer is in a commercial operation, and is intended to make good prints, I expect that it is more likely to be right. The reasons are too complicated to explain here, so I hope you'll just trust me on this one. My last point: your eye tends to be much more critical with a physical print than with monitor color. If you let them auto-correct, this is just another fly in the ointment. For best control of the process, you would ideally not let them auto-correct. One important thing to be aware of is that printing services usually give the option to have your images printed "as is," with no adjustment, or with "auto-correction," where their system automatically tries to improve your image. If you ever suspect that your printing service has shifted, run another test image to see if it's any differnt. If you save these test prints, you can use these for future reference. If it were me, I'd take an image file that I know is good (you might download some on-line printer test images), then 1) make sure it looks good on your monitor and 2) try having it printed. Likewise, the Walgreen's printer is supposed to print this same color. So your computer monitor is supposed to show this definite color, or at least fairly close. The main issue is that any one specific set of RGB numbers in your image stand for a definite color (assuming it has a color profile). I tend to think the user (you) is more often the main problem, but as Lex says, it's hard to be sure where the (main) problem is. Hi Anne, yes, I think it is fairly common. They looked better on my computer, at least. Yesterday I sent out a few photos to Walgreens and when I picked them up, they looked crummy.
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