michael (02/03/83)
I have been very disappointed by the quality of the local photo labs so I am going to give mail order a try. I don't take a lot of pictures so I don't mind paying for premium quality developing. Can anyone recommend a top notch lab? Alan Michael seismo!uwvax!michael michael@uwisc
jc@mit-athena.UUCP (John Chambers) (03/29/85)
Yet another comment about my experiences with Kodak. A couple years ago I tried getting prints of a slide that had a few bright objects (mushrooms & bracket molds) against a very dark background (a mossy log). The Kodak prints came back printed so that the exposure was correct "on the average" across the shole picture. In other words, they overexposed it badly to try to bring out the background, and the foreground came out white. I argued for a while, but the only answer I could get was "That's the way we do it; your picture is underexposed." In comparison, I sent the slide to an Agfa lab, and got back several beautiful (if you like fungi on dead logs) prints that were the proper shades of murky dark green with little white and yellow things highlighted against the darkness. Since then, I've had Agfa make more prints, and they have almost always come out quite good. They are more expensive than Kodak, though. -- John Chambers [...!decvax!mit-athena] If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the precipitate.
ron@brl-tgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (04/01/85)
> background (a mossy log). The Kodak prints came back printed > so that the exposure was correct "on the average" across the > shole picture. In other words, they overexposed it badly to > try to bring out the background, and the foreground came out > white. I argued for a while, but the only answer I could get > was "That's the way we do it; your picture is underexposed." > Hmm, first, I don't deal directly with Kodak, I always talk to my friendly neighborhood camera store (I don't even know if it's possible to deal direct with Kodak). I've never had any complaints about redoing pictures that came back exposed or color balanced funny. I had some sail boats with a background of half water and half sky that looked just fine on the slide that came back too dark. The store just noted my complaints and sent the photo back, it came out OK in the end. -Ron
rfg@hound.UUCP (R.GRANTGES) (04/02/85)
[] My experience (a long time ago, now) is you should have returned print and slide with a note saying: Please expose for (whatever) and allow the background to go black. For me they followed my instructions and I got what I wanted. Maybe they cant handle yours, though. I understand they have a meter that reads average exposure.If you can"t tell them where on the slide to set themeter to read average, you could be in trouble. My picture was of Mt. Rushmore heads with bright sky over. I told them: Expose for heads (large area) average, let sky burn white - and they did it. Got just what I wanted. -- "It's the thought, if any, that counts!" Dick Grantges hound!rfg
jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) (04/08/85)
>> In other words, they overexposed it badly to >> try to bring out the background ... > >The store just noted >my complaints and sent the photo back, it came out OK in the end. When prints are first printed by a lab, it's usually done in a very fast machine -- everyone's negatives get taped together into a very long strip (that's what that numbered piece of tape that usually comes back with your negatives is... the piece of tape that joined it with the next person's), and the whole strip goes through the developer, then through a printer that prints everyone's prints onto a continuous roll of paper at a very high rate (around 5 prints/second on the really fast machines). Then the strip of paper gets chopped up into your final prints. That's why the prints come back on sizes of paper you can't buy at your local photo store -- it was bought as a large roll and cut up into the final sizes. But when you send negatives back and tell them "reprint these", they usually can't put it in the automatic machine; they have to do it via a slower method. Hence you get them redone on a different machine than the original processing. I've found it's much better to try to find someplace that contracts their processing out to a medium-sized local lab. Surprisingly, perhaps, here in Orlando the best place for that is K-Mart. They send the film to a very old, but very good, lab in town called "Champagne Color" (something I discovered by looking at the papers that came with a batch of prints the person at the photo counter was putting up one day when I stopped by). They do a far better job than a lot of the other places -- I think because they use slower equipment; they do a surprisingly good job of color correction, etc., even from very difficult negatives. The moral of this story is that if you have to send prints back a lot, try some other place until you find one that does a good job. As the review of Agfa print film in the latest Modern Photography pointed out, just because it's done by Kodak doesn't necessarily mean it will turn out well. The fast, high-speed equipment often doesn't work as well as the slower machines, because there's a tradeoff between speed and quality. -- Full-Name: J. Eric Roskos UUCP: ..!{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!vax135!petsd!peora!jer US Mail: MS 795; Perkin-Elmer SDC; 2486 Sand Lake Road, Orlando, FL 32809-7642