Question for photographers! Help before I make my prints!

Jen5372 · 08-13-2008, 06:00 PM

Hi. My wedding was this past weekend and my photographer gave me all my photoson a disk so I can [print as many as i like or whatever with all of them!

He was great-but in all of the pics our skin looks very red-sunburned actually. now my friends and family took pics all at the same time and our skin is onl red in the PRO pics. I dont know why.

The question is-what should I do to adjust the color efore I print them for framing and albums? There are almost 500 pics-Im not printing all of them-but Im sure i will print a ton. I want to get them printed somewhere good so I can get matte finish and change some to B and W.

Suggestions??

Thanks :)

Nic Dragomire · 08-13-2008, 06:15 PM

hey Jen, can you post one?

Jeremy_Gilliam · 08-13-2008, 06:22 PM

Congrats on your wedding! If this is a 3rd party photographer that you hired I'm sure they would be willing do some color corrections if you brought it to their attention. If it was a photographer that was included in a package you have several different options to fix them yourself for printing. Corel makes a great product: Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 that has a 30-day free trial, plenty of time to fix the color. Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 - Paint Shop Pro Photo X2
It is pretty user friendly and only costs $69 if you wanna keep it.
Pro labs as well as places like Wolf Camera color correct, just alert them that the pictures are particularly heavy on red and you would like them color corrected to balance that out. The cost would depend on the amount of red on a scale from lightly sunkissed to LOBSTER. If it is closer to the latter there may be no extra cost for the color balancing. Good luck!

Evan Baines · 08-13-2008, 09:30 PM

Step one is to make sure its not your monitor. People can go for years with badly out-of-whack color on their monitor and just get used to it. Professionals (should) use calibrated monitor systems to ensure true color fidelity when retouching...

Step two is once you know the prints are definitely off, then contact the pro who delivered these funky files. They should fix it, no questions asked. If the pro shot in RAW (instead of JPG), then you will most likely get a better color correction than you could achieve on the JPGs. (assuming the color problems stem from white-balance issues).

If you're going to color correct yourself, you might consider an spyder or other home-use calibration system. the $100 or so can easily pay for itself if you're planning on getting a lot of prints.

If the problem is consistent, programs like Adobe Lightroom are ideally suited to batch-process colors into the correct state. You can correct one image, and then apply the correction to the rest of the affected pics.

Professional labs like MPIX.com offer color correction of the images as well. Many of these labs include color correction at no additional cost. That would be an easy solution, but if the colors are way out there, I'd feel leery of sending the files off in that state.

Nic Dragomire · 08-13-2008, 11:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Evan Baines

Step one is to make sure its not your monitor. People can go for years with badly out-of-whack color on their monitor and just get used to it. Professionals (should) use calibrated monitor systems to ensure true color fidelity when retouching...

Step two is once you know the prints are definitely off, then contact the pro who delivered these funky files. They should fix it, no questions asked. If the pro shot in RAW (instead of JPG), then you will most likely get a better color correction than you could achieve on the JPGs. (assuming the color problems stem from white-balance issues).

she said the non pro pics look fine... so its not her monitor

first look at your contract to see if you were to be given the "proofs" or original files which are basically files right out of the camera, or were you supposed to get the color corrected files ready for printing?

if you were to get the color corrected files, then contact the photog.
~ nic

TammyB · 08-14-2008, 07:21 AM

IMO if you wanted to test print a few picture, go to MPix and do "color correction" and see if that fixes the problem. Mpix has really good quality prints. I printed all my wedding pics from them. (or course I didn't color correct since my photographer did that for me)

But with all that said, some photograhers don't include processing photos in their price, or they charge extra for it. So, maybe it would help to contact him first to see if it was included.

lambert13 · 08-14-2008, 07:31 AM

It's a possiblility that the photographers monitor could be out of whack as well when they were editing the photos. If every single photo has a color cast to it, it would be an easy fix for them to go back and do a batch edit of all of them. I would contact them and see what they say.

Evan Baines · 08-14-2008, 01:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nic Dragomire

she said the non pro pics look fine... so its not her monitor

first look at your contract to see if you were to be given the "proofs" or original files which are basically files right out of the camera, or were you supposed to get the color corrected files ready for printing?

if you were to get the color corrected files, then contact the photog.
~ nic

I've seen a lot of folks who are used to dealing with low saturation and contrast from their P&S images, who crank up those two variables on the monitor. Then, if they're using a lab that corrects, they get the prints back more vibrant than the actual files were. To them, they don't see a difference, and assume all is well. Then, if the pro provides more saturated and contrast-y images, they may look wrong on the screen even if they are better prepped for printing. There are a lot of variables that come into play in a situation like this: the only three ways to be definitely sure that the files are defective is to A) Run a test print where you are SURE the lab isn't correcting for you or B) Get calibrated or C) Send the files to someone who is.

I'm not disputing that the files are funky, and the photographer may be on a bad system. I'm just saying it pays to be sure that its not a mis-calibrated screen first. I'll happily view samples on my calibrated system to confirm that its the files and not the monitor!

Nic Dragomire · 08-14-2008, 05:40 PM

I personally think that the photog used nikon cameras and is being lazy by not color correcting the images... but thats my estimation