As I wandered through Leamingon on Saturday afternoon, I came across a wedding party – a perfect chance to hone my hobby a bit more. I stayed out of the way of the guy making a living from the shoot, and attempted to get some decent photos. Of the 50+ photos that I shot, there are about 10 that are decent, and maybe 2 that are good – at least when viewed on my LCD. I punted my choices across to Jessops (their online system powered by Snapfish), and ran a single 5×7 of each of the pictures.

I now have the pictures in front of me, and have a few observations.

1. Despite being pre-cropped to 5×7, the printing process managed to slice a few millimeters off of each end of the photo. Normally not a problem, but I’ve got at least one shot where the top of the groom’s head has been sliced off, as has his elbow.
   1. Lesson: When using Snapfish, leave a few mm extra on the crop
2. Black and white on my screen looks totally different from black and white prints. The colour cast of the black and white shots is ‘wrong’ for some definition of wrong – the saturation is off, and there’s a greenish cast to the print.
   1. Lesson: Not sure yet, perhaps try Photobox. Probably get a Spyder too, to calibrate the screen.

I’ve now shunted the same photos over to Photobox, Kodak and Bonusprint and will see how their printers handle the same images. Of those three, Bonusprint are the only ones who seem to offer the colour profile of their printers.  The other possibility is that I need to switch to AdobeRGB instead of sRGB – I would hope that Lightroom is embedding the profile data. Once I’m happy with the printer output, I’ll try to get a set of the photos sent to the bride and groom – hopefully by going down where the wedding was held, and asking them to please forward the prints.