Tag Archives: printing

Trouble Printing Due to Color Management

The number of emails I get each day telling me about amazing offers is substantial and they almost never survive more than a cursory glance. However, Walgreens were doing 60% off poster prints and I had been reworking an image I had done a while back of the Bembridge lifeboat. I had changed the titling, added a logo and repositioned the images slightly and wanted to reprint it. The original print was done by MPix but I figured the Walgreens print was so cheap, why not give it a go.

I tried to upload the jpeg that I had exported from Lightroom but they said its dimensions were too large. I went in to Photoshop, resized it, changed the color space to sRGB and saved as a jpeg. This I uploaded to Walgreens without any trouble. I should have been worried at the time that the screen thumbnail looked a little muddy but I ordered the print. Later that day I went and got it. Sure enough, it was dull. (Another print I got at the same time was fine so I figured it wasn’t just their printing being poor.)

I went back to the image in Photoshop and it was set to sRGB as I expected. Poor colors are most likely to be a color management issue. I then went to the properties of the files in Windows Explorer and, for some reason, the color space of the Photoshop created file was not defined. It was on me and not Walgreens. I took the original image and exported it from Lightroom with a limit on the long edge and uploaded that one. It looked fine this time and the resulting print – another offer came up fortunately – was exactly as I wanted. In these comparisons, while taken with my phone, hopefully you can see how different the colors are. The oranges are particularly harmed on the boats and even the rust dust thrown up from the slipway. I thought I had done it right but still had an error creep in. Lesson learned.

Printing Things While Stuck At Home

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I got lucky on the timing for one thing during this whole adventure. I was sitting at home playing around with some images and decided I wanted to create a couple of prints. One was a print of the hummingbirds from the back yard and the other was a poster I decided to make of a bunch of lifeboat shots from our visit to the UK last year. My usual print outlet is Mpix so I created the files, uploaded them and sent the order. A few days later a large package arrived on the porch. Shortly before it arrived, I got a message from Mpix saying that they were suspending work as a result of the virus. They are based in Kansas so I guess it took a while to get to them. I am really happy with the prints and it reminded me of how much a physical print is better than looking at something on a screen. I will have to print more when they are back up and running.

Blue Angels at Oceana (And High ISO)

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I have only been to the Oceana show once. I headed down there with my friends Ben and Simon. We weren’t terribly lucky with the weather. There was flying during the show but things were overcast and deteriorated as the show went on. The finale of the show was, naturally for a big Navy base, the Blue Angels. I was shooting with a 1D Mk IIN in those days and that was a camera that was not happy at high ISO settings.

The problem was, the light was not good and the ISO needed to be cranked up a bit. Amusingly, if you were shooting today, the ISO levels would not be anything that caused concern. Current cameras can shoot at ISO levels without any noise levels that would have been unthinkable back then. However, I did learn something very important with this shoot. The shot above is one that I got as one of the solo jets got airborne. I used it as a test for processing.

I processed two versions of the image, one with a lot of noise reduction dialed in and one with everything zeroed out. I think combined them in one Photoshop image and used a layer mask to show one version in one half of the image and the other for the second half. When I viewed the final image on the screen, the noise in one half was awfully apparent. It was a clear problem. However, I then printed the image. When I did so, things were very different. If you looked closely, you could see a little difference. However, when you looked from normal viewing distances, there was no obvious difference between the two.

My takeaway from this is that viewing images on screens has really affected our approach to images. We get very fixated on the finest detail while the image as a whole is something we forget. We print less and less these days and the screen is a harsh tool for viewing.