fotoman150

I always gave the lab a TIFF if it was a wall portrait.

Beenthere

The guy is asking for help.., this kind of snide response does NOT help.

Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

I happen to have a high end print shop just a few miles from my house. They informed me that if I give them TIFF files in the aRGB color we will never have a problem with me getting prints where the colors do not match the colors I see on my computer screen. I have not found an online printing service that lets upload TIFF files.

dfrost01 Loc: Princeton, NJ

Right on! Rudeness is never helpful

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

As long as the EXIF metadata is tagged with Adobe RGB, AND you embed the profile in the image file, you should get correct color conversions.

To *see* all of what is in an Adobe RGB file properly, your monitor must have a color gamut wide enough to display it... and be calibrated and custom profiled.

Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

I don't know if this counts or matters, but the print shop I use has Apple computers exclusively and I do my work on an Apple computer. Perhaps I should ask the print shop how they calibrate their monitors and do mine the same way. So far I'm very happy with the work they do for me.

BudsOwl Loc: Upstate NY and New England

If you click on quote reply, you will then definitely be responding to the individual and we can see who you are responding to.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Most labs charge less if YOU nail the color balance and brightness. If they do it, it’s a labor intensive step. If you print large, often, a calibration kit becomes cheap.

Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

Thanks for that information. I'll definitely get a recommendation from them about what kind of calibration tool I should use.

This print shop is not really geared for small jobs. They have huge printers and normally print billboard sized things. They also print a lot of decals for transfer to cars and trucks. They also make smaller prints for me on canvas or foam board.

natureslight Loc: Winona, Minnesota

Alright, thanks for all your help. Not sure what you mean to embed the profile in the image file, but I will look into that. I do have a monitor[BenQ SW271] suitable for the parameters you stated earlier as well as an X-Rite Display Pro1. Thanks again for all your advice. Definitely what I was looking for. Mark

natureslight Loc: Winona, Minnesota

Thank you, I'm having trouble finding a lab that will take those files. I'm really confused with all the information I've gotten as I'm not sure if it's needed to get a high resolution print, it just seems the more information the file contains, the better the image will be. I'll keep looking into this until I know what to do. Thanks for your reply.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The REAL things that matter WHEN SUBMITTING JPEGs are:

> Dimensions of the image in PIXELS
> Desired print resolution (not to be confused with printER resolution, print resolution is how many uninterpolated original pixels created from the camera sensor data are available to spread over each linear inch of paper)
> JPEG quality setting when saved

Theoretically, proper print viewing distance is 1 to 1.5 times the diagonal dimension of the print. (Remember A^2+B^2=C^2, where A and B are the sides, and C is the diagonal)

For an 8x10, we need at least 240 original, from the camera or post processing software pixels, spread over each linear inch of a print. If you have that, larger prints may be interpolated to any size, and as long as we don’t view them from closer than the diagonal dimensions!

More original pixels are welcome, so use as many as possible without exceeding the lab’s file size limits.

A JPEG quality setting of 10, 11, or 12 on a 12 point scale, or 85 and higher on a 100 scale, is sufficient to avoid visible JPEG artifacts. The larger the print, the less compression I use.

If the lab accepts 16-bit TIFFs, ask whether they accept lossless compression, and if so, what kind? The LZW method is common. That can cut average file sizes in half.

Unless you submit UNcompressed TIFFs, file sizes have no direct correlation with quality.

natureslight Loc: Winona, Minnesota

Alright, again I thank you, but I have some learning to do. My thoughts were a 100mb 16 bit tiff file (not sure if this is lossless or not exported from lightroom] in Adobe 1998 color space would give a much better resolution on a large print, say 20"x40", than a 6mb jpeg in sRGB. I am researching some of what you said previously and learning about file resizing and exporting now. I know I'm confusing some of these issues and am trying to get this all figured out for the best quality prints I can get. Perhaps a larger jpeg file is all I need. As I stated in my original post, all the labs I've looked into so far only handle 8 bit jpeg files in sRGB.

Imagemine Loc: St. Louis USA

the best advice I can give , is export from light room in at lease 750 dpi that will cover you with most large prints , also you can select that when you export your image 300 dpi for smaller prints like 8x10 & 13x19 another thing calibrate your monitor before printing I use Spyder Pro. Good Luck !

Leitz Loc: Solms

Doesn't seem to matter who says what, this mug isn't buying it!