----- Original Message ----- From: "Joseph Tainter" Subject: Question: Minilab processing of digital files
> Sometime soon, perhaps at Christmas, I will get my wife a digital > point-and-shoot. She would not want to do image editing or printing, > just take the SD card to a minilab. > > With most of my *ist D images, I have to use Photoshop's Auto Levels to > get the image to the full light-level gamut. Otherwise the images are a > bit muddy. > > My wife is not going to do this with her images. So I wonder: If you > take unprocessed jpeg images on a CF or SD card to a minilab, does the > machine perform something like Auto Levels? Or do the images just come > out muddy? The joys of digital. It was so easy when people shot film. The cameras, were easy, the technology was easy, and image processing was easy. Not so anymore. Point and Shoot digital is quite the oxymoron, I do believe. Anyway, I really like the customers who take the time to learn what the various settings do, and then set their cameras up to give a result that pleases them with as little input from me as possible. Image massaging on a minilab is much the same as what we get to do with film, except we can do less before the image goes to shit. If it is underexposed, we can't fix it as much as with film (digital printing of film really shines here), if it is overexposed, we can't do anything to fix it. If it is shot under the wrong white balance, we can't fix it as well as we can with film. It really is a more demanding medium than colour print film. So, my advice is to RTFM, and then try a few different settings and get them printed at your lab of choice. Set the white balance to sRGB if the option is available, and leave it there. It's where we work, and you should work there too. After that, if you don't like the results, see if a camera setting can fix it. If it can, set your camera there and treat it as your default setting. If you can't, and the lab can't help you, take the files you have shot and try another lab. If they give you results you like, stay with them. William Robb
