Julian,
In the past, I had the same problem - sending calibrated prints to online
printers and receiving dark prints back.
It has been some time since I printed anything online - but the issue
obviously remains. I quizzed the online printers, who were exceptionally
helpful and once I'd got in touch with the correct person (someone who
actually understood what I was talking about!), and we worked out the
problem.
The printers I was using at the time (Photobox.co.uk) had their standard
consumer-type machines set up to completely ignore any embedded profile.
They told me at the time (some five years back) that this was in fact
industry standard - YMMV. Since it stripped out all profile information,
it just took basic RGB data from the file and printed it using their
standard setup - which always came out too dark.
The solution was to print on their larger machines. Their larger machines
(printing on much bigger paper) were set up on the assumption that the
users would be either professionals or advanced amateurs. The larger
machines did take notice of the embedded profile - but it forced you to
either print big pictures (>18" along one side I think), or copy several
photos (using the same profile) onto a single canvas and send that in -
have them printed onto one large sheet and then cut them to size by hand
afterwards. So by ordering photos of a larger size, they automatically
went to the larger printer, and it examined and used the embedded profile.
It worked too. But in all honesty, it was a right Royal PITA, so I didn't
do much after that.
I understand that other more professional set-ups (smaller companies) offer
a full service that does take notice of any embedded profile etc, but you
will of course, pay slightly more for that. You might want to speak to
your three online printers to see if this is a similar situation, and then
either try printing using any specific machines set up to read the profile,
or find yourself a suitable 'professional service' printers that
understands your needs.
It might cost more - but sometimes the quality of service is worth paying
for if your prints come back looking how you wanted them to in the first
place!
Someday, it might be a good idea for there to be a list on a website
somewhere which lists out suitable online printers that do the job
right...! And how to order from them to achieve this...
Best of luck.
Mark.
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 22:15:08 +0100
> From: "Julian J. M." <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [Darktable-users] Color profiles (one more time)
> To: "Rob Z. Smith" <[email protected]>
> Cc: darktable-users <[email protected]>
> Message-ID:
> <CAOUjXSUfc87thYdjBzM0hsZcHUatjYH=o1gz51=
> [email protected]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 9:13 AM, Rob Z. Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > If you want a colour managed browser for displaying mages I think Firefox
> > is the tool of choice - I understand that Chrome isn't colour managed
> yet.
> >
> > That said, if the image is sRGB it ought to look pretty much the same
> > whether the viewing application is colour managed or not. If dt shows
> the
> > image significantly differently to an exported I guess that means that
> > either (a) there are out of gamut colours in the dt image that can't be
> > rendered in sRGB or (b) the export isn't doing a good job of converting
> to
> > sRGB. Do you have high quality sampling enabled for exports?
>
>
> High quality sampling doesn't make a difference. Given the fact that I
> printed (the same) photos on 3 different online services, and all of them
> came darker than expected, I can think of 2 possibilities:
> * My monitors are not well calibrated. (I used gnome color + Huey Pro).
> * Some issue with the display driver, not adjusting gamma correctly. It's a
> Nvidia NVS 300 with propietary driver 304.88
>
> I guess I should find someone with a proven calibrated monitor, view my JPG
> there, and check if they look more similar to the prints I have.
>
> Julian.
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