Silly noob questions about dpi and correct colours

[wonderer]

Hi all

I am looking into getting prints done for my customers but the whole printing area is pretty grey for me at the moment. I am hoping to use ds colour labs as have heard good things about them and they can post directly to customers with no branding, all good.

Ok silly question part. Most if not all of my images are way higher than the usual recommended 300 dpi for printing. Usually around the 600 dpi mark. Does this matter and will it affect print quality or is the 300 rule just a minimum and not to be be below? Would print quality be negatively affected in any way with higher dpi or does it just mean: Higher dpi = higher quality prints and larger print sizes possible?

Also I have my monitor set calibrated, albeit cheaply, with a Spyder pro. Does this mean what I see colour wise onscreen is what will be received print wise? Looking on their website they have their own colour profiles but im not sure whether that means I need to use their colour profiles to edit the photos in the first place or not which would A, be really inconvenient and B, make monitor calibration pointless if every printers has their own colour profiles no?

Sorry for the probably eye rolling questions but its an area I have really not spent any time with. All I am looking to achieve are prints that look as crisp and nice on my monitor with the same colours or as close as.

HELP!! :bonk:

 

[snapalot]

First question do you have photoshop?
If so it's quite straight forward. Download the ICC profiles from DSCL, double click them and they will install automatically assuming you are using windows.

Open your image in Photoshop and click Edit/convert to profile and choose DSCL profile for the type of paper you wish to print on. This will probably alter the colours on your screen, adjust the colours to your satisfaction/ this is how it should look like on a print from DSCL.

I think they ask for 300dpi so just a matter of Image/Image Size, alter it to the size you want at 300dpi and they are ready to save and send.

There are other methods but that one is the most straight forward, in my opinion anyway!

 

[wonderer]

First question do you have photoshop?
If so it's quite straight forward. Download the ICC profiles from DSCL, double click them and they will install automatically assuming you are using windows.

Open your image in Photoshop and click Edit/convert to profile and choose DSCL profile for the type of paper you wish to print on. This will probably alter the colours on your screen, adjust the colours to your satisfaction/ this is how it should look like on a print from DSCL.

I think they ask for 300dpi so just a matter of Image/Image Size, alter it to the size you want at 300dpi and they are ready to save and send.

There are other methods but that one is the most straight forward, in my opinion anyway!

Hi. Thanks for your reply. Yes I have photoshop and I use srgb. It seems like a real pain tbh if I have lots of purchased shots from customers to go through that process. Each shot would be edited differently and have different colour saturation etc so I essentially have to re- edit each shot using their colour profile? And then change the images to 300 dpi? I presume that can be done in bulk in PS but still, that's a lot more time taken up especially if I'm ordering many prints each day. And I can't edit the shots originally using their colour profiles as it won't then be calibrated right?

Would there be much difference in the colours etc in the prints if my monitor is calibrated?

Nothing is simple is it lol :shake:

 

[snapalot]

We did a job not long ago for someone who came in with 750 images on disc to be printed to 5x7. There was no way I was going to mess about with that lot so I sent them all to DSCL as they were.

They all came back ok for what they were but if you have spent a lot of tme on your images a few seconds might be worth it.

Do they not do colour correction for their profiles?

You know you can a open a raw file and assign the colour space to it at the begining.