Help, Photos look good on LCD too dark printed

I dont understand it. i have calibrate my monitor and after post processing, i have a photo that looks great. but when i send it to a local print house it comes out dark. It seems to only happen with night photos. Day shots seem to come out fine. What am i doing wrong? I have some beautiful night shots, but i cant get them to print out very well.

Hmmm ... firstly, how have you calibrated your monitor? With a calibration device?
Secondly, can you tell us a little more about your workflow? Eg what colour space are you shooting & processing in?

Some photo printing services apply their own colour and exposure correction to digital files before they print them. The changes this brings about are often most marked for shots such as sunsets etc.

If your daylight photos are being printed correctly by them and it is only the 'sunset' type shots that are coming out wrong then I would suspect this correction is happening. You need to find a service that does not do this but which prints out a file exactly as you send it to them.

One of our magazines in the UK, "Digital Photo" recently published an article on this problem and showed how such correction ruined many evening time shots. They also listed processing firms that do not do this - of course they are based in the UK and not a lot of use to you but I am sure you can find out such info for your location.

I used an older kit a family member had made by X-Rite. I beleive this is the company that turned into the spyder. It uses a puck placed on the LCD and runs a series of tests. Honestly, i didnt notice any difference after the calibration. The screen looked the same to me, except for the fact that the brightness went down. I use sRGB 8-bit for my workflow and i use CS2 for my photo editing. All my photos start in RAW and i then process then from there. I recently created a panoramic of a mountain skyline that measures about 17in tall and 5ft long. Again the photo looked great on the monitor and had late afternoon sun highlights. But when it cane back from an online photo shop it was too dark and i didnt wind up using it. i figured my problem was that my monitor had too high a contrast rate and that is why they looked great on the screen but dark in print. But if that was the case wouldnt the day time photos also be dark. Or is it just that the light shift is more noticable in darker photos? Also, i figured the calibration software would account for this?

You still haven't said what online company you ordered your prints from, but use a "professional" lab like Elcocolor.com or Mpix.com and indicate that you want no corrections made. See if your results look better.

Pugwash wrote in post #3197366
Some photo printing services apply their own colour and exposure correction to digital files before they print them. The changes this brings about are often most marked for shots such as sunsets etc.

If your daylight photos are being printed correctly by them and it is only the 'sunset' type shots that are coming out wrong then I would suspect this correction is happening. You need to find a service that does not do this but which prints out a file exactly as you send it to them.

One of our magazines in the UK, "Digital Photo" recently published an article on this problem and showed how such correction ruined many evening time shots. They also listed processing firms that do not do this - of course they are based in the UK and not a lot of use to you but I am sure you can find out such info for your location.

Have you got a link? I would love to see that list!

Might be your print shop is messing things up. Might be something else is off.
Can't check the first, but you can check the latter: Click the link in my sig

Sorry, i am updloading my photos to a local lab here in Albuquerque to have them printed. To be honest i dont remember the internt place i used because after i got the print i was so disappointed i threw away there site. I do remember that no one on this site or at Photoshop Users had ever heard of them. Plus they sent my panoramic print loosly folded up in a flat box. Needless to say when it got here it was slightly creased.

Thank you for all the feedback, i will look for a better online printer.

olly_k wrote in post #3197517
Have you got a link? I would love to see that list!

This is their website http://www.photography​mags.co.uk/ but even when I logged in I couldn't see the reports on online printing. Could be because they were in March 07 magazine and that's about 3 months old now!!

In that edition they had tested the following online services

Bonusprint www.bonusprint.com Got mediocre ratings all round although they didn't appear to have adjusted levels, colour, etc.

Boots (Pixology) www.bootsdigitalphotoc​entre.com low ratings and criticised for using an Autolevels process which ruined a sunset photo.

Foto.com www.foto.com Mediocre ratings although the sunset was reproduced fine.

Klick photopoint www.klick.co.uk Low ratings - levels had been seriously altered.

Kodak EasyShare gallery www.kodakgallery.co.uk 5 stars for image quality but more expensive and slower than other services. Detail and colour matched that of the files uploaded i.e. had not been altered.

myPix.com www.mypix.com 5 stars for print quality no alteration to files but service very slow as based in France and postage takes time.

PhotoBox www.photobox.co.uk Got 5 stars all round - no apparent alteration to files, good value and very fast (within 24 hrs of upload).

Snapfish www.snapfish.co.uk (owned by HP and, I believe, does the processing for Jessops). Image quality okay except for the sunset scene where it was obvious that Auto Levels had been used and wrecked the shot.

I'm sure there will be readers of this forum who have their own recommendations to make but BonusPrint, PhotoBox, Mypix and Kodak all seemed to have left the files unaltered in this test.


You pays your money............etc..​..........etc..