dark photos (1 Viewer)

i just got a load of photos back from photobox and they are dark compared to what i see on screen.

I use a laptop so ive been told this can sometimes happen. Im not sure i can callibrate it.

How do you get round this. Do you brighten the photos you want developing or is it more involved than this?

Seems a shame to spend time getting it just so on screen to lose out on developing.

Mark

before anyone comes on discussing matters of calibration etc etc. I think it would be a good idea if you simply uploaded a couple of pictures which appeared OK on your screen and which you sent in for printing. We might get an idea first if the problem is at your end or the printers.

the darkest and most obvious as being to dark and that made me realise they were all dark were of my kids in a bluebell wood. Am i allowed to post a picture of my kids on here?

mark f said:

I use a laptop so ive been told this can sometimes happen. Im not sure i can callibrate it.

Click to expand...

You can calibrate a laptop's screen. However, there is no guarantee that this photobox place you mentioned is going to use any calibration info.

Seems to me you have 2 problems - 1) your pictures probably are too dark and require some post-processing; 2) you are using an external printing service, so you lose control over how they get printed.

Even if you were printing the pictures yourself, you would have this problem. It is quite difficult to get prints to match what you see on-screen, and, as you mentioned, this is what calibration is for. But in practice you don't really need to resort to calibration, once you get to know how your screen and printer differ. In my case, I happen to know that the prints I get are somewhat darker than what I see on-screen, so when I want to print something, I just boost its brightness some before I print it. Works pretty well.

Print dialogs often have an advanced setting where you can tweak the settings. By using these, you wouldn't even have to modify the image for printing as I am doing.

However, seems to me that once you send the images to someone else for printing, all bets are off. No telling what they will do.

In this specific case with your kids' pictures, you might try brightening them some and getting photobox to reprint them.

I have the same issue with photobox. Some of the pictures on my blog came out considerably than I expected

Hi Mark

One problem with a laptop is that how bright or dark a photo looks will depend on the angle the screen is viewed from so even if you calibrate it the results will vary. Photobox provide a callibration print which you can compare with the same print viewed on their website this may help you to set your screen to match the Photobox printer.
I use Photobox for all my printing and yes they tend to be a bit darker than they appear on screen but I don't have much of a problem with them.

The link below will take you to the calibration print on the photobox website

http://www.photobox.co.uk/content/quality-advice/calibration


Peter

PM sent.

thanks for all your help and advice. Well photobox have sent me thier calibration card which when held up against the screen is showing the same difference as was seen in the photos they printed.
The card has much more colour than is seen on screen but is much darker.

Problem is i cant work out how to change the screen settings!! If i go into control panel and click on change resolution or screen appearance i cant find any way of changing the brightness or the colour. I can go from 32 bit colour to 16 bit and can change resolution etc , but nothing else.

Can you help? Am i missing something?? Thanks Mark.

I've used photobox for several years now and had great results from them. However my last set of prints were also darker than I expected. A problem at their end prehaps?

There is a fundamental difference in the way a photo is seen on a laptop screen v a print. The reflected light coming off a print in will usually seem to be darker than the 'backlit' screen on your laptop. Make allowances by ensuring you have set a white and black point in photoshop ensuring your blacks will be black and your whites white. Check the histogram to make sure the exposure is correct and your prints should be fine, but never the same as the laptop screen which is lit in a different way. An LCD screen works by polarising transmitted light. Your photo works by you seeing reflected light from it's surface. Calibrating programs may not help.