ProPhoto RGB and Frontier 370?

Wondering if anyone can help here

I've just received some 15x10 prints back from a high street photo lab and they all look very "dull" compared to what I exported and indeed compared to some 7x5 prints of the same shots. They were all printed at the same time and the guy in the shop tells me they use a Fuji Frontier 370.

It appears to be a colour space issue but I don't understand why the 7x5 prints look ok and the 15x10 ones do not, as they would have all been printed from the same file.

I shoot raw, tweak in Lightroom and export as Jpegs using ProPhoto RGB. I do this thinking that being a larger colour space all will be ok - I think not!?

Should I be exporting from Lightroom using sRGB rather than ProPhoto - would this work? If so why is a larger colour space giving me "dull" looking colours - are the lab converting the colour space again?

Why the difference between the 2 prints?

Any comments most welcome.

BTW these are a couple of the photos and how they were supposed to look.





The enlarged prints looked muddy in comparison!

Unless the printer can read embedded profiles, then it will probably assume sRGB, hence the muddy pictures.

Most labs assume sRGB and ignore embedded profiles. A larger colour space isn't the blessing it sounds. If you're working in 8bit (jpeg) then you're trying to fit increased saturation into the same space. With 8bit you've got 256 shades of a colour but ProPhoto might, for example, need 320 shades to reach full saturation, clearly you can't store them all every nth shade will be dropped which results in banding. The dullness you saw in the prints is the direct result of printing without colour management. In your file a red value of 180 might translate to 255 in sRGB but because the values weren't translated it was printed at the existing value giving the dull result. This also shows that your image didn't need the extra saturation of ProPhoto in the first place.

Unless you're staying in 16bit, have a seriously expensive monitor and will output to a printer that fully supports 16bit files stick with sRGB as there's no gain only headaches.

pxl8 said:

A larger colour space isn't the blessing it sounds.

Click to expand...

I'm beginning to realise this and will stick to sRGB from now on. Thanks for the feedback.