Why is my picture much darker when printed?

Question

I just received an order of pictures that I ordered through SmugMug. All of them look just like I expect - except one of them is much, much darker.

There's a fair amount of white in the picture (a white chefs jacket) - did it get digitally adjusted or whats going on?

Answer 1

There are many reasons that this can happen - but the most typical reason is that your monitor is lying to you - most monitors are set too-bright, thus fooling you into thinking the photo is perfectly exposed. The next thing is that monitors are back-lit where as physical prints use reflected light. Nailing the exposure is critical, rely on the histogram in Photoshop, Lightroom or whatever editing tool you are using. We have a help page that explains more on this, here.

If you will write to our Support Heroes, with the order #, and put it attention Andy, we'll look specifically at your order and help you out personally. Every print is guaranteed fully, and we'll be happy to adjust that print and print it again for you.

Answer 2

In addition to the pointer from dpollitt I also recommend that you order a calibration print from SmugMug to use for reference. I keep my monitors calibrated using Huey Pro and soft proof before I send to the printer. However the two final steps I do is calibrate my reference for lack of a better phrase by looking at the calibration print and the image on SmugMug (using Firefox as it has better color management) to get a read of how the color will change while simultaneously in a different window, on the same screen, checking how my image works.

If something is really important to me I will print out a test print at home on my inexpensive printer and look at how it turns out. Once again just for reference.

I then get a feeling of confidence of how the image will print. Since going to this process I have not had a problem print, I have even had some surprising successes, such as getting the color differences to be visible on shades of jelly beans. Link to Jelly Bean Photo

Answer 3

The first step is to make sure that your monitor is color calibrated. Some ways to validate that you have done that correctly exist in this previous answer: How can I Validate that my monitor is color calibrated?

Once you have that set, you need to look at the color space that you are embedding in your images, and make sure that that matches what the accepted color space is on the printer that you are choosing.

I would recommend downloading the EZPrints(since you are using them as a Power user) ICC profile that can be found here. Use that to soft proof your images in Photoshop and make sure that everything looks as you would expect. The link that Andy provides also goes into some detail about the levels and what to look for in that which may be helpful to you.

Once you have a properly calibrated workflow, and you take the time to soft proof, you should rarely or ever be surprised by the output that is delivered to you. Good luck!