Prepairing images for drugstore-printing: howto?

lowlandspentax · 06-28-2016, 04:48 AM

Hi all,
I want to try local drugstores for printing my digital images using the printing machines these stores offer in their photo-corner..
The machines are of the type: put in your usb-stick/cd with the image files (yes, you can transfer from your smartphone too, but as i do not have such a tool, i will rely on the usb-stick) and do some selecting and resizing on a screen and let your pictures get printed and walk away with them (after paying, sure!!!).
I would like to at home prepare my photo files myself in a way they are ready for printing as they are on my stick.
It would be selecting a part of the digital photo/make the composition, correct colours and sharpness e.g., and sizing them to the 10x15 cm. format i would like to have the prints in.
As i never did this, is there a howto to do these steps with best result -on this forum or elsewere on the Net?

(i expect, most of you would use a professional service, but that is not for me

).

(the camera is a pentax k10d, files are in jpeg and some in raw too; i do have Gimp for manipulating (as i use Linux OS only)).

Thank you for reading and some suggestions.
lowlandspentax

**pepperberry farm** · 06-28-2016, 05:50 AM

I've never used one - I print snapshots at home or have mpix print for me (and they are having a 4x6 print sale, BTW): Quality Prints | Photo Books | Cards | Home Decor | Photo Gifts : Mpix

CarlJF · 06-28-2016, 06:11 AM

If you want to adjust colors, sharpness and contrast, I guess you work from the DNG file and not the jpg.

The first thing you should do is to calibrate your screen. If not, you could get significant differences between the colors you see on the screen end the printed ones. Although the match isn't perfect even with a calibrated screen, it should be better without obvious color cast between the screen and the print.

The best and easiest software I know to proceed is Lightroom, but it's not an option on Linux. You could certainly do the job with Gimp, but it will be a lot more work... The advantage with LR is that you can apply presets on many pictures and batch export them... And, if needed, use the crop tool at 10x15cm (4 x 6), or simply lock the native ratio since this correpsond to APS-C format.

So, I would try to find something similar to what LR does for Linux. I know that there's a software called Lightzone that's supposed to do just this on Linux, but I haven't used it. Thus, I can't tell for sure. But it's certainly worth a try...

jabbershort · 06-28-2016, 06:21 AM

There is a very good Lightroom alternative for Linux called darktable. Offers a huge amount of features and its reasonably easy to use. I would definitely recommend calibrating your monitor though, I had a bad experience when the first batch of photos I got printed all came out looking very green when on screen they had appeared fine. Other than that all I can suggest is picking one photo and getting it printed to see how they come out and make any adjustments before printing everything you want.

edit: beaten by dcshooter for the darktable recommendation!

sherrvonne · 06-28-2016, 07:06 AM

Originally posted by dcshooter

A couple other things while I think about it:

- A lot of the printers used at drugstores/Costco/Wal-mart/etc. will slightly crop the image while printing it, so you might need to leave a little bit of bleed area at the edges of your image.
- If you know the type of printer used by the particular drugstore at which you are printing, you can typically find an ICC profile online that will let you match colors more closely. If you let us know which drugstore you are planning on using, I might be able to point you to the correct model. If you check out , you might even find a profile for your specific store (although it is more oriented toward Costco, etc. than drugstores).

You are right about the cropping, because once I edited quite a few images exactly how I wanted them for photo frames and put them on an SD card, 8 x10, 5 x 7 etc.... Only to have the machine 're crop' the images and not let me decide where it cropped. It was irritating so I had to go back home and put another set of images on the card with space around the images. This machine was at a Walmart. I found a better machine kiosk at a Walgreens but those were my only two selections available. Knowing what you are working with ahead of times helps.

**ramseybuckeye** · 06-28-2016, 07:13 AM

Most of these drugstores have a website where you can upload the photos and then go pick them up, I have used this many times when I needed prints in a hurry. I would be hesitant to put my memory card into their machine that sits out in the open.

atupdate · 06-28-2016, 07:25 AM

I get all of my prints done at Sam's Club. One thing I learned is that I have to significantly lower the brightness on the monitor to match that of the printer at Sam's. It never hurts to print a couple of practice prints to how the printer colors and brightness match to your computer.

Tim

**paulh** · 06-28-2016, 08:19 AM

Disclaimer: I work at Walgreens photo dept. What a lot of customers (regular soccer moms/non-photographers) don't understand is that most digital output (especially from phones!) does not conform to standard print sizes. The Walgreens kiosk and website have a cropping tool that lets you preview and make adjustments to your prints. Otherwise, it will default to a center crop, usually cutting off someones head or feet!

I agree that it's a good idea to try a few test shots to dial in the colors. I see color variations from store to store, even though many of them are using the same equipment. Also, the kiosks do not store customers' photos. They are gone once the customer signs off, or leaves the machine idle for about 5 minutes. But please remember to take your usb drive or phone with you when you leave!

You'd be surprised how many are left behind!

PDL · 06-28-2016, 10:28 AM

My 2 cents.

Calibrate your monitor - I know it has been said, just reiterating. However, calibrate with a real calibration tool - do not trust your eye as it will fool you.

Go to the web site for your preferred outlet and search for printer profiles. I use Costco which provides individual printer profiles for each store and each printer within that store. Save, print to JPEG, export the file using the dimensions of your selected print. (In other words crop the image BEFORE you send it out to be printed) The software packages I use, Capture One Pro and Lightroom allow you to customize output image size.

The most important part is to save, print to JPEG, export using the printer profile provided by the print shop. Search during the upload for a switch that disables the printer to automatically adjust, you have adjusted the image and embedded the printer profile in your software.

If you can not find printer profiles or a method to over ride automatic adjustments, ask. If you can not find both profiles and a mechanism to disable automatic adjustments -- find another place to get your images printed.

arkav · 08-17-2016, 06:58 AM

Originally posted by ramseybuckeye

Most of these drugstores have a website where you can upload the photos and then go pick them up, I have used this many times when I needed prints in a hurry. I would be hesitant to put my memory card into their machine that sits out in the open.

With one of the big grocery store chains here in Ontario, I could see a noticeable difference between the same file printed from the kiosk and printed via upload. I think they were doing some kind of compression on the uploaded files. YMMV

I've also found many of the kiosks seem to turn up the saturation, or do some other tweaking by default. The colours in my photos tend to look a bit garish compared to when I have the same image printed by other means. And there's the slight crop that always happens, even if you bring them a file that's sized to 4x6 at 300dpi.

There was a time when I knew which of a number of kiosk options would give me the most consistent results, but most of them are gone now.

sherrvonne · 08-17-2016, 09:26 AM

Originally posted by arkav

With one of the big grocery store chains here in Ontario, I could see a noticeable difference between the same file printed from the kiosk and printed via upload. I think they were doing some kind of compression on the uploaded files. YMMV

I've also found many of the kiosks seem to turn up the saturation, or do some other tweaking by default. The colours in my photos tend to look a bit garish compared to when I have the same image printed by other means. And there's the slight crop that always happens, even if you bring them a file that's sized to 4x6 at 300dpi.

There was a time when I knew which of a number of kiosk options would give me the most consistent results, but most of them are gone now.

At at Walgreens I took a SD card of edited photos and the purple graduation gown (which printed normally on my own printer) in the photos printed out horribly over saturated. I had to go home, (a distance of 45 miles) desaturate the properly saturated purple. Then go back on another day and reprint, the purple printed out normal then.

aleonx3 · 08-17-2016, 10:46 AM

Originally posted by dcshooter

Most of these machines are optimized for sRGB images, so make sure all the printable jpegs you submit are in that color space.

Actually, I heard it is the opposite... most web and online viewing is optimized for sRGB and printing is optimized for Adobe color space. However, I am not sure...and I could be wrong.

rfg · 08-18-2016, 11:24 PM

My "howto" would be:
1. crop the images to the aspect ratio of the final print
2. calibrate your monitor if you can - at least google for settings online for your exact monitor. At absolute minimum make sure your monitor is not at 100% brightness - if it is you'll almost certainly get dark prints.
3. do a test run to see if you need to alter saturation or brightness or colour balance so the print better matches what you saw on your screen. For example my local BigW (like a Target in US) prints were OK for saturation and colour but slightly on the dark side (see point 2

). On the other hand a photobook I had printed was a bit under-saturated but OK otherwise.
4. Do a virus scan on your USB drive as soon as you get home!

Maksim · 08-24-2016, 01:14 AM

My advice... don't.

Had the same prints done both at my local camera store's lab (they sent away for next day pick up), a few CVS, and my wife found a place online that did canvas prints and regular prints.

The stuff done online and from the lab were far better than the stuff at the local drug stores, and even cheaper too. $.19 for a 4x6 vs $.29 here at CVS.

More than that, it is about the competence of the people doing prints. I requested CVS to do a few 8x10s... came in, picked up... paid, looked at envelope... the prints were skewed lightly towards red. the 4x6 had a roller mark through them, and same for 8x10.

I showed it to the tech, and he looked at me like nothing was wrong with the prints. Asked them to reprint... he changed out the dye/films for printer... reprinted... this time colors were better but the 8x10 had almost like dust artifacts throughout the images. Asked to reprint again... he tried to mess with the machine but after 30 mins I just got tired and had them return the money.

It's like passport photos.... you can get them done at CVS by a $8 per hour employee who also rings the register and stocks shelves, or you can get them done for the same price at a camera store by a competent photographer.

At the end of the day, I would rather support the local camera store who will remember me and value my business than a CVS or a Costco who will not miss you if you print any images or not.

Tip... I used to work as an HP sales and marketing rep. If you want to print images... go to Staples or Best Buy and see if there is rep, they will be happy to print your images on their machines to see if you like them. You can also put them on a USB and just print yourself, buy some photo paper if you want or bring some. Most managers would not mind if you print a few.

Over the years I acquired stacks of 4x6 photos I printed on HP printers as demos, and most of those reps are fare more into photography and imaging than drug store reps.

06-28-2016, 04:48 AM	#1
lowlandspentax Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2016 Posts: 32	Prepairing images for drugstore-printing: howto? Hi all, I want to try local drugstores for printing my digital images using the printing machines these stores offer in their photo-corner.. The machines are of the type: put in your usb-stick/cd with the image files (yes, you can transfer from your smartphone too, but as i do not have such a tool, i will rely on the usb-stick) and do some selecting and resizing on a screen and let your pictures get printed and walk away with them (after paying, sure!!!). I would like to at home prepare my photo files myself in a way they are ready for printing as they are on my stick. It would be selecting a part of the digital photo/make the composition, correct colours and sharpness e.g., and sizing them to the 10x15 cm. format i would like to have the prints in. As i never did this, is there a howto to do these steps with best result -on this forum or elsewere on the Net? (i expect, most of you would use a professional service, but that is not for me ). (the camera is a pentax k10d, files are in jpeg and some in raw too; i do have Gimp for manipulating (as i use Linux OS only)). Thank you for reading and some suggestions. lowlandspentax

06-28-2016, 08:19 AM	#8
paulh Site Supporter Join Date: Sep 2010 Location: DFW Texas/Ventura County, CA Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 33,273	Disclaimer: I work at Walgreens photo dept. What a lot of customers (regular soccer moms/non-photographers) don't understand is that most digital output (especially from phones!) does not conform to standard print sizes. The Walgreens kiosk and website have a cropping tool that lets you preview and make adjustments to your prints. Otherwise, it will default to a center crop, usually cutting off someones head or feet! I agree that it's a good idea to try a few test shots to dial in the colors. I see color variations from store to store, even though many of them are using the same equipment. Also, the kiosks do not store customers' photos. They are gone once the customer signs off, or leaves the machine idle for about 5 minutes. But please remember to take your usb drive or phone with you when you leave! You'd be surprised how many are left behind! Last edited by paulh; 06-28-2016 at 10:36 AM.

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
Problems printing multi images on 1 sheet?	Ilovemypentax	Digital Processing, Software, and Printing	6	12-08-2014 07:05 AM
Preparing images for commercial printing	cbope	Digital Processing, Software, and Printing	15	10-17-2013 12:11 PM
Printing Images---Different Papers?	alamo5000	Digital Processing, Software, and Printing	8	07-10-2013 08:27 PM
Suggestion Linking Images from MobileMe HOWTO	JesseDavis	Site Suggestions and Help	3	12-30-2009 07:32 AM
Printing images on t-shirts?	jmdeegan	Photographic Technique	6	01-09-2008 03:01 PM

06-28-2016, 05:50 AM	#2
pepperberry farm amateur dirt farmer Join Date: Dec 2014 Location: probably out in a field somewhere... Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 41,679	I've never used one - I print snapshots at home or have mpix print for me (and they are having a 4x6 print sale, BTW): Quality Prints \| Photo Books \| Cards \| Home Decor \| Photo Gifts : Mpix

06-28-2016, 06:11 AM	#3
CarlJF Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2014 Location: Quebec City Posts: 1,185	If you want to adjust colors, sharpness and contrast, I guess you work from the DNG file and not the jpg. The first thing you should do is to calibrate your screen. If not, you could get significant differences between the colors you see on the screen end the printed ones. Although the match isn't perfect even with a calibrated screen, it should be better without obvious color cast between the screen and the print. The best and easiest software I know to proceed is Lightroom, but it's not an option on Linux. You could certainly do the job with Gimp, but it will be a lot more work... The advantage with LR is that you can apply presets on many pictures and batch export them... And, if needed, use the crop tool at 10x15cm (4 x 6), or simply lock the native ratio since this correpsond to APS-C format. So, I would try to find something similar to what LR does for Linux. I know that there's a software called Lightzone that's supposed to do just this on Linux, but I haven't used it. Thus, I can't tell for sure. But it's certainly worth a try...

06-28-2016, 06:21 AM	#4
jabbershort Forum Member Join Date: Nov 2015 Location: UK Posts: 51	There is a very good Lightroom alternative for Linux called darktable. Offers a huge amount of features and its reasonably easy to use. I would definitely recommend calibrating your monitor though, I had a bad experience when the first batch of photos I got printed all came out looking very green when on screen they had appeared fine. Other than that all I can suggest is picking one photo and getting it printed to see how they come out and make any adjustments before printing everything you want. edit: beaten by dcshooter for the darktable recommendation!

06-28-2016, 07:06 AM	#5
sherrvonne Pentaxian Join Date: Jan 2014 Location: Texas Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,975	Originally posted by dcshooter A couple other things while I think about it: - A lot of the printers used at drugstores/Costco/Wal-mart/etc. will slightly crop the image while printing it, so you might need to leave a little bit of bleed area at the edges of your image. - If you know the type of printer used by the particular drugstore at which you are printing, you can typically find an ICC profile online that will let you match colors more closely. If you let us know which drugstore you are planning on using, I might be able to point you to the correct model. If you check out , you might even find a profile for your specific store (although it is more oriented toward Costco, etc. than drugstores). You are right about the cropping, because once I edited quite a few images exactly how I wanted them for photo frames and put them on an SD card, 8 x10, 5 x 7 etc.... Only to have the machine 're crop' the images and not let me decide where it cropped. It was irritating so I had to go back home and put another set of images on the card with space around the images. This machine was at a Walmart. I found a better machine kiosk at a Walgreens but those were my only two selections available. Knowing what you are working with ahead of times helps.

06-28-2016, 07:13 AM	#6
ramseybuckeye Site Supporter Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Hampstead, NC Photos: Gallery Posts: 17,292	Most of these drugstores have a website where you can upload the photos and then go pick them up, I have used this many times when I needed prints in a hurry. I would be hesitant to put my memory card into their machine that sits out in the open.

06-28-2016, 07:25 AM	#7
atupdate Pentaxian Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Dayton, OH Photos: Gallery Posts: 4,724	I get all of my prints done at Sam's Club. One thing I learned is that I have to significantly lower the brightness on the monitor to match that of the printer at Sam's. It never hurts to print a couple of practice prints to how the printer colors and brightness match to your computer. Tim

06-28-2016, 10:28 AM	#9
PDL Pentaxian Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: PNW USA Photos: Gallery Posts: 2,128	My 2 cents. Calibrate your monitor - I know it has been said, just reiterating. However, calibrate with a real calibration tool - do not trust your eye as it will fool you. Go to the web site for your preferred outlet and search for printer profiles. I use Costco which provides individual printer profiles for each store and each printer within that store. Save, print to JPEG, export the file using the dimensions of your selected print. (In other words crop the image BEFORE you send it out to be printed) The software packages I use, Capture One Pro and Lightroom allow you to customize output image size. The most important part is to save, print to JPEG, export using the printer profile provided by the print shop. Search during the upload for a switch that disables the printer to automatically adjust, you have adjusted the image and embedded the printer profile in your software. If you can not find printer profiles or a method to over ride automatic adjustments, ask. If you can not find both profiles and a mechanism to disable automatic adjustments -- find another place to get your images printed.

08-17-2016, 06:58 AM	#10
arkav Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Ottawa, Canada Posts: 366	Originally posted by ramseybuckeye Most of these drugstores have a website where you can upload the photos and then go pick them up, I have used this many times when I needed prints in a hurry. I would be hesitant to put my memory card into their machine that sits out in the open. With one of the big grocery store chains here in Ontario, I could see a noticeable difference between the same file printed from the kiosk and printed via upload. I think they were doing some kind of compression on the uploaded files. YMMV I've also found many of the kiosks seem to turn up the saturation, or do some other tweaking by default. The colours in my photos tend to look a bit garish compared to when I have the same image printed by other means. And there's the slight crop that always happens, even if you bring them a file that's sized to 4x6 at 300dpi. There was a time when I knew which of a number of kiosk options would give me the most consistent results, but most of them are gone now.

08-17-2016, 09:26 AM	#11
sherrvonne Pentaxian Join Date: Jan 2014 Location: Texas Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,975	Originally posted by arkav With one of the big grocery store chains here in Ontario, I could see a noticeable difference between the same file printed from the kiosk and printed via upload. I think they were doing some kind of compression on the uploaded files. YMMV I've also found many of the kiosks seem to turn up the saturation, or do some other tweaking by default. The colours in my photos tend to look a bit garish compared to when I have the same image printed by other means. And there's the slight crop that always happens, even if you bring them a file that's sized to 4x6 at 300dpi. There was a time when I knew which of a number of kiosk options would give me the most consistent results, but most of them are gone now. At at Walgreens I took a SD card of edited photos and the purple graduation gown (which printed normally on my own printer) in the photos printed out horribly over saturated. I had to go home, (a distance of 45 miles) desaturate the properly saturated purple. Then go back on another day and reprint, the purple printed out normal then.

08-17-2016, 10:46 AM	#12
aleonx3 Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: Brampton, Ontario Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 3,996	Originally posted by dcshooter Most of these machines are optimized for sRGB images, so make sure all the printable jpegs you submit are in that color space. Actually, I heard it is the opposite... most web and online viewing is optimized for sRGB and printing is optimized for Adobe color space. However, I am not sure...and I could be wrong.

08-18-2016, 11:24 PM	#13
rfg Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: Sydney Posts: 139	My "howto" would be: 1. crop the images to the aspect ratio of the final print 2. calibrate your monitor if you can - at least google for settings online for your exact monitor. At absolute minimum make sure your monitor is not at 100% brightness - if it is you'll almost certainly get dark prints. 3. do a test run to see if you need to alter saturation or brightness or colour balance so the print better matches what you saw on your screen. For example my local BigW (like a Target in US) prints were OK for saturation and colour but slightly on the dark side (see point 2 ). On the other hand a photobook I had printed was a bit under-saturated but OK otherwise. 4. Do a virus scan on your USB drive as soon as you get home!

08-24-2016, 01:14 AM	#14
Maksim Site Supporter Join Date: Nov 2015 Posts: 80	My advice... don't. Had the same prints done both at my local camera store's lab (they sent away for next day pick up), a few CVS, and my wife found a place online that did canvas prints and regular prints. The stuff done online and from the lab were far better than the stuff at the local drug stores, and even cheaper too. $.19 for a 4x6 vs $.29 here at CVS. More than that, it is about the competence of the people doing prints. I requested CVS to do a few 8x10s... came in, picked up... paid, looked at envelope... the prints were skewed lightly towards red. the 4x6 had a roller mark through them, and same for 8x10. I showed it to the tech, and he looked at me like nothing was wrong with the prints. Asked them to reprint... he changed out the dye/films for printer... reprinted... this time colors were better but the 8x10 had almost like dust artifacts throughout the images. Asked to reprint again... he tried to mess with the machine but after 30 mins I just got tired and had them return the money. It's like passport photos.... you can get them done at CVS by a $8 per hour employee who also rings the register and stocks shelves, or you can get them done for the same price at a camera store by a competent photographer. At the end of the day, I would rather support the local camera store who will remember me and value my business than a CVS or a Costco who will not miss you if you print any images or not. Tip... I used to work as an HP sales and marketing rep. If you want to print images... go to Staples or Best Buy and see if there is rep, they will be happy to print your images on their machines to see if you like them. You can also put them on a USB and just print yourself, buy some photo paper if you want or bring some. Most managers would not mind if you print a few. Over the years I acquired stacks of 4x6 photos I printed on HP printers as demos, and most of those reps are fare more into photography and imaging than drug store reps.