Traditional prints from D7

I take your point that printed and screen environments are very different but I do achieve much more successful images out of of Epson 750.

I will try CMYK but I will be surprised if this has any effect as there are no inks involved.

It was interesting to read that others have had better results avoiding DIVU - I will try this next time as well.

Arran

Tortellino said:

Even after you calibrate your monitor you prints ARE BOUND to look
different.

First, you have a difference between a back-illuminated (monitor)
and a reflected (print) image.

Second, the monitor uses red, green, and blue primary colors to ADD
to black for making colors, whereas printers use cyan, magenta,
yellow and black (in the best case with light cyan and magenta
added) to SUBSTRACT from white to make colors, so some colors
cannot be reproduced exactly the same in principle. You just have
to accept it and keep in mind. You can improve the quality of the
print if you know how it is processed. Professional designers
convert the image to CMYK from the very beginning, and do all
adjustments after. This allows to somewhat approximate the result.
You can convert your images in Photoshop to CMYK and see how
different the result will look.

Torte

Click to expand...

dotPhoto.com provides very bad services, I have to tell you my experience so you will not suffer like I did.

My wife ordered 382 pictures from dotPhoto.com on April 18 after my Italy trip. After one week wait, we finally received the photos, but there were only 130 prints (Besides that, 6 of them were in very bad quality.). My wife called them and left a message in the voice mail, she also sent an email to their support, but she got no response. So she called them again after a few days, finally she talked to their support - Charlene. She asked my wife to order the missing 252 photos again, she will credit them back to her account. So she spent a lot of time checking which photos were missing, then reordered them again. My wife also sent her email asking her to check the new order before shipment, because we really hate to see another mistake. Of course, she never replyed to my wife's email.

Finally, we got the reordered photos on 5/10, but it was 56 photos short again !!!!

My wife called them today, Charlene picked up the phone, my wife explained the problem to her. She answered "according to the shipment weight it should contain the correct number of photos". She refused to send us the missing 56 photos, but saying the only solution is sending her back the whole order, then she will refund the money to us. This is really not a solution to us, how can we choose to ship the photos back to them? We spent many hours to upload all those photos, additional hours to do ordering and re-ordering, calling them and email them many times for their mistakes, plus my mom and my aunt were waiting for those photos to bring back to Taiwan, my friends were also asking for the Italy photos for long time. Now, after 3 weeks of waiting, we finally got most of my trip photos, and the only solution she offered us is to ship them all back for refund instead of correcting their own mistake (to give us my missing photos)....

My wife had a long argument with Charlene, but Charlene's attitude was very bad. My wife asked to talk to Charlene's supervisor, Charlene said she is "the" manager in support, no one else is supervising her. My wife asked to talk to their president, Charlene refused to do it. .... We have never faced such a ridiculous customer support. Now, our only choice is to treat this 56 photos as our own loss. I cannot believe a well known company will choose to steal our 56 photos (It's only $15.00 !!) !

So, my friend, my advice to you - don't deal with dotPhoto.com.
I hate to see other people suffer like I have experienced.

DavidG said:

I have also transfered Video from my miniDV video cam to CD with
VCD, I setup the VCD software on her PC, all she has to do is put
in disk and click on play- she loves watching the videos and seeing
pictures of her Great-grandchildren!

It is difficult to watch her struggle through some of the things
with the computer-finding the mouse arrow to name one, but she
enjoys it.

DavidG91388 said:

not all people have computer at home. not all people like to view
all these pictures using computer or so. can you imagine my 80
years old mom trying to use computer to view his grandson wedding
pictures? that's a joke.
so i think, that this is man's personal problem which way to go.
and 20 or 30 bucks spent for it isn't an issue, because they do
this sporadicly. if they do this constantly - this is their problem.
jack

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

dotPhoto.com provides very bad services, I have to tell you my experience so you will not suffer like I did.

My wife ordered 382 pictures from dotPhoto.com on April 18 after my Italy trip. After one week wait, we finally received the photos, but there were only 130 prints (Besides that, 6 of them were in very bad quality.). My wife called them and left a message in the voice mail, she also sent an email to their support, but she got no response. So she called them again after a few days, finally she talked to their support - Charlene. She asked my wife to order the missing 252 photos again, she will credit them back to her account. So she spent a lot of time checking which photos were missing, then reordered them again. My wife also sent her email asking her to check the new order before shipment, because we really hate to see another mistake. Of course, she never replyed to my wife's email.

Finally, we got the reordered photos on 5/10, but it was 56 photos short again !!!!

My wife called them today, Charlene picked up the phone, my wife explained the problem to her. She answered "according to the shipment weight it should contain the correct number of photos". She refused to send us the missing 56 photos, but saying the only solution is sending her back the whole order, then she will refund the money to us. This is really not a solution to us, how can we choose to ship the photos back to them? We spent many hours to upload all those photos, additional hours to do ordering and re-ordering, calling them and email them many times for their mistakes, plus my mom and my aunt were waiting for those photos to bring back to Taiwan, my friends were also asking for the Italy photos for long time. Now, after 3 weeks of waiting, we finally got most of my trip photos, and the only solution she offered us is to ship them all back for refund instead of correcting their own mistake (to give us my missing photos)....

My wife had a long argument with Charlene, but Charlene's attitude was very bad. My wife asked to talk to Charlene's supervisor, Charlene said she is "the" manager in support, no one else is supervising her. My wife asked to talk to their president, Charlene refused to do it. .... We have never faced such a ridiculous customer support. Now, our only choice is to treat this 56 photos as our own loss. I cannot believe a well known company will choose to steal our 56 photos (It's only $15.00 !!) !

So, my friend, my advice to you - don't deal with dotPhoto.com.
I hate to see other people suffer like I have experienced.

DavidG said:

Best color came from dotphoto, but I had to question sharpness that
was not present as compared with other sites- they explained that
they do have a soft focus, may try sharpening then processing for
them. BTW they were the cheapest and seem to have best customer
service as per my experience and limited problems/issues.

Some same images appeared warmer than others between the sites.
Some had blue cast, while others a slight yellow.

I had also used Photoimpact to crop and compress, this did not
affect the Quality of 4x6 print using straight from camera image,
but saved in my upload time. I am now beginning to use Photoshop
and a T1 at work to upload so I don't have a real concern for time
anymore.

Have used Ofoto, Shutterfly- these two have a lot of extra
features, borders, etc- I preferred Shutterfly if I had only those
two to choose from.

Now I am using ezprints(they have nice panaromic shot choice and
large prints as well as specialty items) and dotphoto as mentioned
above.

I am sure I'll test more, but prefer dotPhoto presently.

DavidG91388 said:

After reading some of the advice I am going to put several versions
of the same image for processing at two different shops. I will try
different colourspaces, with and without using DIVU etc - I will
post my findings.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Arran,
After you put into Photoshop, did you adjust the image size up from 72dpi?
Bob

Arran said:

I have recently received some prints back from my local developers
which were taken with my D7. This is the 2nd time I have done this
and both times I have been disappointed with the quailty of the
final print. Detail is fine but the colours are over saturated, the
prints are dark and the images are suffering from noise.

The pictures were taken at max size on fine mode. I put them
through DIVU and then took them into photoshop where I adjusted the
levels. The pictures look great on screen - the right colours,
little or know noise.

I do not know a lot about how traditional prints are created from
digital media but presumably a scanner is used at some point in the
process. Could my local developers be using cheap equipment or
could they be changing the jpeg file and resaving it before using
as the basis for the print.

Has anyone else had problems with creating traditional prints from
D7 images, is there anything I should be doing to the files in
order to better target normal prints?

Arran

Click to expand...

I had spoken with Charlene as well who was helpful to me, and mentioned that they are changing some of there procedures and methods over the next few weeks- I hope that I will not have the trouble you mentioned-which may have occurred during the changeover- but still no excuse. When I placed my phone call, the CEO(he did not mention who he was took my phone call)- Charlene mentioned this when she called me back later to answer my questions. It seems to me that all the labs are not consistent, looking back I would rate Shutterfly and ezprints high and for the price and capabilities dotPhoto is good so far in my eyes.

dotPhoto has a nice service for sharing photos on the web and for even selling your photos to others for a profit...

DavidG

Robert Sun said:

dotPhoto.com provides very bad services, I have to tell you my
experience so you will not suffer like I did.

Click to expand...

Robert Sun said:

DavidG said:

Best color came from dotphoto, but I had to question sharpness that
was not present as compared with other sites- they explained that
they do have a soft focus, may try sharpening then processing for
them. BTW they were the cheapest and seem to have best customer
service as per my experience and limited problems/issues.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

From reading through post it appears the Monitor was not calibrated and only used DIVU so remained at 72dpi which at full size and printing upto 8x10 should not be an issue.

I prefer not to use DIVU-straight from the camera has given me the best print results except where WB is noticeably off, then I did adjust with Auto Fix setting/options in DIVU, but did not play around with changing the colorspace or other adjustments.

Bob Bruce said:

Arran said:

The pictures were taken at max size on fine mode. I put them
through DIVU and then took them into photoshop where I adjusted the
levels. The pictures look great on screen - the right colours,
little or know noise.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Previous poster wrote:

or should I say cut and pasted the same "long negative" message in a bunch of replies to a few of my threads concerning a terrible experience he had with dotphoto, I should say all my threads that I explained of my good experience with dotPhoto.

Maybe you get what you pay for and require a little extra work-they offer the cheapest prints as far as I can tell out there as low as 17cents per 4x6 and the sharing and website is very nice as i have posted...I would say that I would be pretty upset if they screwed up a large order twice expecially after calling.

I used the online Q and A and it was delayed about 24 hours, but they did correct all my problems and gave me print credits for future orders...