ICC Profile and on-line photolabs

[robski]

Whilst skullying around doing some research for the CRT Calibration thread I bumped into an on-line photolab site.

http://www.proamimaging.com/

I notice they provide an ICC profile for their Fuji machine and advice on how to send images to them for printing.

Just interested to know if any other photolab sites offer a profile to match their machine ?

[Gidders]

I have used them and they are ok ... and very cheap - £1.25 for 18 x 12 is amazing - but be careful if you want true neutral tones - in B&W I've found they have a cast to them which I guess must be present in all their output, even if its not immediately visible.

I have recently become dissatisfied with the lab that I've been using and so tried 4 different labs sending them each a couple of test print to evaluate their output. My conclusion was that One Vision Imaging delivered the greatest colour accuracy - not as cheap £7.05 for 18 x 12 but when I'm producing prints that people are paying for, its important that they look right

[robski]

Thanks for the Tip Clive

I don't normally print by ink Jet, laser jet or Photo Lab so I have little experience of real world problems.

Earlier this year I used an on-line lab in Guernsey mainly because their 8" x 10" were a fraction of the high street prices.
Not having much experience of setting up images of photo lab work I sent a small batch off. One of the shots was for a neighbour which was mainly monochrome. On return the colour shots were passable could do with a bit more punch. On the mono shot I could detect a slight green tinge in the mid tones. When viewed in daylight it was more noticeable.

Anyway the neighbour was happy enough with the results, but it was niggling me.

I sent a second batch of colour with a bit more contrast and brightness plus a gray scale wedge.

At work I have a spectrocam where I can take spot readings of the gray scale wedge.

Attached are 2 graphs of the readings at Daylight (D65) viewing and normally commercial viewing (D50).
A few things to note the daylight (D65) spectrocam reading does appear a tad greener as the real life viewing in daylight indicated. The printed solid black is about a 5% black in RGB terms. Shadow detail starts to appear in the region of 15% to 20% in terms of RGB. The readings at 255 are in fact reading the Fuji crystal archive photo paper which is a hard blue white. Lower down the scale the blue channel is some way behind the the red and green. I have noticed that images out of my camera have a bias towards blue, maybe to offset the lack of blue in photo lab work.

I tweaked the neighbour's shot to pull up the shadow and add a touch of blue and sent a 3rd batch.
The results were better but not what I would regard as perfect. I let the neighbour have the updated version FOC and she did agree it looked better. Not that she was unhappy with the first attempt.

[robski]

If your bored some light reading on the topic

http://www.fujifilm.eu/eng_media/Fro...06-english.pdf