On receipt of my images I gave them a thorough inspection for quality and overall condition. I was fairly pleased with the overall printing of the images. I would award them 7/10 on the overall printing of my photos. I awarded them a score of 7 because overall for the price of £1.05 for an A3 print I consider this was fairly good value for money and I wouldn't expext the quality to be any better at this price
To evaluate the prints I would say that the images are a little on the dark side and are not exactly the same brightness as seen on my pc monitor. They lack a little vibrancy and the clarity is not perfect even though I did I did download and send my images for print using the print company's ICC profile.There are no banding marks evident, no surface marks or scratches. Colours seem to be a fairly true to my originals and there are no colour casts evident. The paper they use is a Lustre paper which seems to display the image with a smooth texture. With choosing a print size of A3 obviously the images look better when viewed from a distance and seem a little soft on the focus when viewed close up
The company gave a requested image size of 4950 X 3510 pixels to print an A3 image with no cropping evident. I configured these dimensions in Photoshop and then saved the image files with their recommended ICC profile and dimensions
Shown below is my image loaded into the company's software before the image is processed for print. You can choose image size,papers,quantity etc from here
The image above shows a part of DC's printing software before the image is finally processed before print. This is a very important part of the software because you can see here how your final image will look before being printed and make final adjustments to get the best out of your prints
On inspection of my final prints I did notice that a couple of my images seem to be a liitle stretched an pix-elated even though I had sized and saved all of my images to the correct dimensions recommended by the company. I was mistified by this and have been analizing this problem over a couple of days. On closer inspection I did find the route of the problem. The two images that were pix-elated had been cropped earlir in Phtotoshop by myself to different pixel dimentions. When I resized them in Photoshop ready for print to the companies given dimensions,the images were being stretched which resulted in pix-elation which also resulted in the prints having a a squashed appearance. I will be aware of this problem next time I send them to print and found this to be a good learning curve
For speed and delivery I would award the company 10/10. I uploaded my images and placed my order 10.00pm on a Sunday night and received them the1st thing on the following Tuesday, approx 34 hours for the whole process,brilliant!!
The overall cost of producing my final 20 images did come into the equation. At D C Colour labs the overall cost to print these 20 images was £25.00 including delivery. In Comparison,to print the same amount of images in college to a similar standard would have cost me £80.00 including test prints
Overall I would have preferred to print my images using the college's printer because I would have had full control of colour management and the advantage of printing my images from a Raw\Psd file which retains more clarity and better definition. However costs won over clarity on the day and for the service they provide I find them excellent value for money
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