Dark prints, how to correct for reprint?

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AWills

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Hello everyone. I had some prints come back pretty dark. I compared the prints to the images on my MacBook Pro and the prints are roughly equal to 4 or 5 on the brightness (8 being middle, 16 being brightest.)

I am now going to be working with my monitor at that level to try to correct them, but how do I go about this? Do I just adjust exposure and contrast in Lightroom?

Also, the black and white prints are very dark. Is there a particular way that black and white images should be processed? All I did was finish editing the photos in colour and then converted them to black and white and exported. Any suggestions on how to do this properly would be great!

Thanks in advance.
 
The standard (and good) advice is to calibrate your display. If you do that and send the files to the printer with the editing colour space attached then the prints should come back as they were on your monitor.

On processing the black and white, I would get exposure and brightness right and then convert to mono. Conversion should not be the last step - spend some time getting brightness, contrast and sharpness right after conversion at the very least.
 
Thanks @john.margetts, is there a way to import the same image in to Lightroom twice, so that the black and white editing doesn't mess with the colour version?

And how do I calibrate my display?
 
AWills said:
Thanks @john.margetts, is there a way to import the same image in to Lightroom twice, so that the black and white editing doesn't mess with the colour version?
Click to expand...

There is the facility to create a 'virtual copy' of an image within Lightroom. I don't remember the option of the top of my head, but I expect if you right-click on an image in the 'Library' one of the options on the pop-up menu will be to create a virtual copy.
 
In either the develop module or library module , right click on the image to bring up the menu. About 2/3 way down is the option to create a virtual copy.

Alternatively you could output via the print module, where there is an adjustment to make both a brightness and contrast adjustment. Only drawback is that you have to specify print size etc. , and the output to JPEG file and get that printed

Additionaly you could set up a preset in the develop module that allows for this adjustment on the virtual copy
 
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.....even on a calibrated monitor the prints may still come out darker. I tend to lighten (exposure) slightly when having photos printed. Also a lot depends on where you're viewing the photo, as sometimes they can seem dark but when you view in daylight they look ok.
JohnyT
 
I had a similar issue a couple of years ago with a photo lab, images were dark and lacked contrast. I had a chat with them about it and even loaded my images to their own pc to check, images were fine, then when printed, back to sq 1. End result, I no longer use them as they didn't see an issue with it.
Good luck.
 
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