My prints from Sams were attrocious, is it me or them?

I just had about 10 8x10's and 4 11x14's printed at Sams, and they all look terrible.

Is it me? Is it them? Am I exporting them wrong?

I used Aperture 3, exported them as 16 bit TIFFs, copyed them onto USB, and they directly input them into their system off the USB. They colors are washed out, crops are a mess and quality looks very sub par.

What format does Sam's want the files? tiff, jpeg and what bit depth, 8 or 16. What color space? sRGB, aRGB, PorPhoto or what?

Most likely an 8 bit jpeg will get you what you want providing your colors are right to start with.

It is Sam's Club. You need to have your prints made at a better lab - probably on-line. They are geared for the consumer.

I've had decent luck with prints from Sams just going straight from .jpg. I'm not certain what benefit you would have starting with tiff files.

MrAl wrote in post #11954450
What format does Sam's want the files? tiff, jpeg and what bit depth, 8 or 16. What color space? sRGB, aRGB, PorPhoto or what?

Most likely an 8 bit jpeg will get you what you want providing your colors are right to start with.

"Colors are washed out," sounds like color space was not sRGB. "Crops are a mess," did you crop to the paper size?

I just had 2 large poster prints made from my Sam's Club. Jpg's that I sent online to them, the only thing I did was turned off their color correction. These two poster prints won 1st and 2nd place in
a local Art Show.

I used to be a manager at a Sam's Club Photo Lab (Gotta pay rent). Well there Fuji Software & Printers do print in, sRGB 8-bit jpeg. So when you download 16bit TIFF's into there kiosks, there computer converts your files to that format, so you are better putting 8-bit sRGB JPEG files on your USB for more consistency in what you see on your home monitor. Also as Terrilp said, he turned off the ''color correction'' Great tip! It is set to ''On'' by default, both on the in store kiosk aswell as for online orders, you must manually turn it off, and I extremley recommend you turn it OFF. This feature, automatically corrects color, saturation, brightness, red eyes, and also applys Noise Reduction ( I have printed the same exact images with & without NR at the Sam's I worked at, the NR does make your images extremly soft! I prefer a sharp noisy image). If you care about your prints, you obviosly don't want these automatic features applied to your images that you possible spend many minutes or even hours pp yourself

Thanks for the comments. I left the color scales in Aperture whatever their default was. I did .tiff because I was told they were much higher quality than jpgs when doing prints. I am pretty sure the color problem was what you pointed out Dustman, the guy printing the pictures seemed clueless. I did not use their fuji or kodak kiosk out front, he took the USB from me and walked me behind the counter and plugged it directly into their large computer back there and went through them with me and chose how many and what size of each.

Dustman wrote in post #11954796
I used to be a manager at a Sam's Club Photo Lab (Gotta pay rent). Well there Fuji Software & Printers do print in, sRGB 8-bit jpeg. So when you download 16bit TIFF's into there kiosks, there computer converts your files to that format, so you are better putting 8-bit sRGB JPEG files on your USB for more consistency in what you see on your home monitor. Also as Terrilp said, he turned off the ''color correction'' Great tip! It is set to ''On'' by default, both on the in store kiosk aswell as for online orders, you must manually turn it off, and I extremley recommend you turn it OFF. This feature, automatically corrects color, saturation, brightness, red eyes, and also applys Noise Reduction ( I have printed the same exact images with & without NR at the Sam's I worked at, the NR does make your images extremly soft! I prefer a sharp noisy image). If you care about your prints, you obviosly don't want these automatic features applied to your images that you possible spend many minutes or even hours pp yourself

This is true. The software automatically assumes sRGB (it ignores all color profiles and assumes srgb, so you better use it, lol). Just use jpegs. Crop first at home. Turn auto-corrections off (tell them). Then you'll be fine.

So just export full size 300dpi jpegs?

Yep. And uhmmm...I should not be saying this, but in my opinion costcos are usually more competent, if you have one around I'd try them instead. :P Also, the fuji kiosk software is absolute garbage.

Another recommendation is to crop all the images at home first before taking it over to Sam's club. For your 8 x 10 portraits, crop them at 8 x 10 @ 300dpi for high print quality. Save them as jpegs. Use sRGB for your color space. This way your colors and crops will be correct. Don't rely on the sam's club software to do the crop for you.

Our local Sam's Club can print tiffs, but they look terrible compared to jpegs. Convert to jpegs before printing to be on the safe side.

Ok great, but onto another problem. The two pictures that had the cropping issues, can a picture be to large to print on 11x14?

I cannot figure out on Aperture 3 how to crop it in 11x14 and the crop boxes go around the entire bird. Any ideas?

add some space to the top and bottom of the image? or print 11x17