Printing to digital photo services

An excellent article on Tidbits explains why my photos have been coming back from Ofoto looking dark and a reminder why I should set my Gamma in Photoshop to 2.2 when using them. Macs are usually set to a gamma of 1.8, and PCs are set to a gamma of 2.2, which explains why an image created on the Mac will look darker and will have more contrast when viewed in Windows, and images created in Windows may look washed out on the Mac. Since most computers run Windows, photo services seem to try to match their output to a 2.2 gamma setting to provide what most of their customers expect. Unfortunately, that meant almost all of my test prints came back looking darker than I expected, and pictures where the color was just right on my computer weren’t as good in print.

Posted by timswan at February 21, 2002 08:35 AM