My First Prints

[Darren Turner]

I am sat here waiting very patiently for the postie to deliver me 12 A4 prints that i have sent off for online. This is the first time i have ever ordered prints, so i am a little worried and curious yet excited as to how they will have turned out.

I assigned printer profiles from the lab to CS4 i have used so hopefully the images should be how i want them to look.......keep your fingers crossed for me folks lol
( thanks for your help on this Lorraine )

Anyhow i also have some black thick framed frames with white mounts sat here ready to accept the images.

You may know i work in a small hotel here in southern snowdonia and the idea is to put some prints on the walls in the public areas of my photos of surrounding landscapes, lakes & sunsets. ( rather than the current horrid prints of drawing & painting from a local artist - a bad one at that......haha )

Hopefully they will look good and potentially they could earn be a bit of revenue for only a small outlay for prints & frames.

I will keep you updated on my progress shortly.

Daz

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Has Mr Posty been yet?

The tension is killing me!

 

[Darren Turner]

unfortunately not.......i am gutted........haha........!

There website states all orders will be dispatched for first class delivery on the same days as order has been placed prior to 11am. So if they are not here by tomorrow i am going to kick off........haha

 

[Laurie Parker]

you should get them tomorrow Darren the first class usually is order say monday delivery usually wednesday. with all mine I get an email saying dispatched then the prints arrive following morning, have also used the courier service to but use that mainly on the very large prints.


I was the same too when I sent my first lot of this time but was so shocked when I opened the package, they really are how I see them on my monitor was well pleased.

And as long as you have put in their paper profile , and have your screen calibrated ( found this very important) as before I used the Spyder my images always came back from labs darker than expected, but since calibrating that's a thing of the past

 

[Darren Turner]

well i am very impressed with most of the images, just couple of my sunsets are a little darker than i would have liked..........

Might look into this spider doofer laurie.........!!

They are in frames ready for the wall, will grab a few shots of them on the wall tomorrow.

Daz

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Nice!

 

[Laurie Parker]

Honestly Darren I used to get prints which always appeared darker than I saw, then I bought the Spyder and I cannot express how much the difference has made to the screen so simple to do takes minutes , I do mine once a month, you will be really surprised at the difference it makes, like I said earlier a couple of your sunsets appear slightly dark here nothing drastic but darker than what they should be, and I would imagine even though your putting the paper profile into the image the lab would be seeing them on calibrated screens to ( which would show to them as slightly dark as they do to me) when you get the screen calibrated open them back up and you will see exactly what I mean. BUT the good thing is you do them in RAW so re editing them once calibrated and particularly if its a shot you really like a re print wont be much of an issue. If you check on the lab in FAQ's they state to make sure screens are calibrated to get the best images

 

[Chris Dodkin]

I'll 2nd everything that Laurie just said

I'd also add that using a laptop would add another level of 'issue' as any self adjusting screen brightness really screws with your ability to produce a print ready image file!

 

[Laurie Parker]

I cant use my laptop at all for doing any photo editing Im all over the place using it lol, mind you I make a right mess when even typing with it me and laptops dont mix, so I agree on laptop use Chris lol,I love my desktop and dual screen monitors can do some editing and also have a natter at the same time on twitter lol

 

[Chris Dodkin]

I'll use my laptop in a pinch, but desktop is absolutely the way to go for photo editing (and calibration)

 

[Laurie Parker]

wish I could use mine just cant get to grips with the keypad on it at all dunno why the slightest touch on the keypad and a letter appears and my god talk about typing errors lol

 

[Darren Turner]

please can someone enlighten me as to why or how a pc screen is better than a laptop screen......??

Thanks in advance

 

[Chris Dodkin]

please can someone enlighten me as to why or how a pc screen is better than a laptop screen......??

Thanks in advance

The first problem I've noted is with the manual / auto brightness feature of most laptop screens - so no matter how carefully you calibrate the settings using a spyder, the screen brightness is always a variable that can mess up you perception of the correct exposure/brightness settings in any given image. Someone switching on a light in the room can cause the laptop to change it's screen brightness, and your perception of the exposure of that image changes...

Add to that the fact that laptop screens traditionally display a smaller subset of color space than a desktop screen, and you have a real issue doing any critical image post processing on a laptop.

In this example, the red triangle shows the limit of colour display of a laptop, compared to the standard sRGB desktop screen (Green/Blue triangle), and the standard Adobe RGB space (Purple triangle).

Basically you can see that your laptop simply can't display as large a range of colours as an sRGB desktop screen, which really is the base minimum for photo work - A better screen can handle Adobe RGB, and accurately display the full Adobe gamut which can then be reproduced by a high quality photo printer.

Having said all that - I do work on a laptop when in the field - but I always re-do images when I get back to a calibrated desktop screen, if I'm going to use them for anything serious.

Hope that helps?