Metallic prints, dark?

pgaviria

This is my first experience with smugmug, I just subscribed for my first year last week! One of the things I was excited about was seeing the metallic prints from bay photos. I ordered these two in 8x12 to see what they looked like:




Overall I am satisfied with smugmug, the cost for shipping two photos was higher than I expected and made me think I should order more at a time next time (do they increase the price with each extra photo?) but when I got the photos I was impressed with the care that it was packed and now I understand why it cost what it cost.

My problem with these prints was that they came back darker than I expected. Has anyone noticed this with their metallic prints? I am wondering if it's something inherent to the paper. In any way, I did not see a way to modify the brightness of the print while ordering it. I might do some test photos with sort of a gradient the way I did them with photochemical prints back in school but even if I nail them in print I am afraid they will not look like I'd like them on screen.

Anyone had this problem? I doubt this is a monitor calibration problem but I will re-calibrate tonight. I know it sounds like it's the most obvious reason.

brjphoto

pgaviria wrote:

My problem with these prints was that they came back darker than I expected. Has anyone noticed this with their metallic prints? I am wondering if it's something inherent to the paper. In any way, I did not see a way to modify the brightness of the print while ordering it. I might do some test photos with sort of a gradient the way I did them with photochemical prints back in school but even if I nail them in print I am afraid they will not look like I'd like them on screen.

Anyone had this problem? I doubt this is a monitor calibration problem but I will re-calibrate tonight. I know it sounds like it's the most obvious reason.

I ordered 4 different 20x30 metallic prints last week. They all came back just as I expected. No problems at all. I ordered them from BayPhoto and did not have any color correction done.

I think the shipping has a lot to do with the fact that they are shipped flat. Considering all the problems I had with larger rolled prints, paying extra to get things shipped flat is more than worth it.

brianb

I had about 25 metallic 4x6s printed about a month ago from Bay, no correction, and they matched my monitor very well (I've got a non-calibrated but eye-adjusted Dell 2209WA), no surprises (other than how great they looked, especially B&W). I will say that your photos look slightly dark to me.

Brian

Andy

pgaviria wrote:

This is my first experience with smugmug, I just subscribed for my first year last week! One of the things I was excited about was seeing the metallic prints from bay photos. I ordered these two in 8x12 to see what they looked like:




Overall I am satisfied with smugmug, the cost for shipping two photos was higher than I expected and made me think I should order more at a time next time (do they increase the price with each extra photo?) but when I got the photos I was impressed with the care that it was packed and now I understand why it cost what it cost.

My problem with these prints was that they came back darker than I expected. Has anyone noticed this with their metallic prints? I am wondering if it's something inherent to the paper. In any way, I did not see a way to modify the brightness of the print while ordering it. I might do some test photos with sort of a gradient the way I did them with photochemical prints back in school but even if I nail them in print I am afraid they will not look like I'd like them on screen.

Anyone had this problem? I doubt this is a monitor calibration problem but I will re-calibrate tonight. I know it sounds like it's the most obvious reason.

Order #?

Andy

Hi, in your case, they printed True Color, which means we made no adjustments at the lab. In photos like this, it's totally a matter of personal taste. If you'd like, we can reprint for you write our Support Heroes ATTN: SteveM and point us to some new, lighter files and we'll do reprints on the house.

pgaviria

Andy wrote:

Hi, in your case, they printed True Color, which means we made no adjustments at the lab. In photos like this, it's totally a matter of personal taste. If you'd like, we can reprint for you write our Support Heroes ATTN: SteveM and point us to some new, lighter files and we'll do reprints on the house.

Thanks Andy, I sent the support heros an email. I guess for now I will allow bayphoto to do most of the color correction and for the more critical stuff I will do trial an error. Thanks.

pgaviria

I received the re-prints today. I gotta say the prints as color corrected by SteveM looked great, at least the colorful house looks just as I expected it to look. The HDR pic I am still not sure how to feel about it. Definitely not bad but... different from what I envisioned for it and both the new color corrected file and print look different than what I intended in my original file. With HDR I have a feeling it might be tricky to begin with given that I am manipulating images and re-interpreting them from raw files, to a screen to paper, all of which have different latitudes... so I suppose those are the type of images I'll have to expect to re-print a couple of times to get right if I want to be picky about them.

I have since realized my monitor IS a bit bright too. I wouldn't say enough to account for the discrepancy.

I saw another thread where people consistently reported prints were coming back dark. I think I saw maybe one report of them coming bright. This suggests to me that maybe the pictures are in fact being printed darker than people expect and it is true that photos look different off an LCD screen than paper, so maybe it could be a good idea to set a printing settings where all prints are printed darker or brighter by 1/3 f-stop increments or something like that so we don't have to have two different galleries, one for viewers and one for printing.

I'll calibrate my monitor to the photos and report back! (until today I've had it calibrated to video color bars since it's what I'm familiar with)