Need Help with event shot over weekend !

[mike_ross]

Hello ,

I am a photojournalist that shot a freelance event over weekend and requesting help .

I shot a aniversity party with Nikon D1 and 3 128mb sandisk cards and G3 powerbook .

I shot all the formal photographs on the NEF raw format and shot candids on Jpg fine mode ISO's 400 and turn off the sharpening and had the low contrast set on and shot images with nice levels in the historgram .

First I brought images after tweaking on MacBibble and so forth to image lab in City I live in and did a couple test prints on 4x6 prints .

First the prints that came off the Digital Konica mini-lab didn't look great and show alot of banding or not much detail in them .

I have had my Nikon D1 sent in for service a couple of months ago and got chip that handles the banding issue replaced and have no problem with camera at work .
And have gotten nice images printed on my Epson printer at home .

My question is do you think it is the Konica Mini-lab machine or am I doing something wrong to images .

Steps that I am doing are the following :
1. Open images in MacBibble and check white balance and put the noise contoler on medium and have the sharpen off on Macbibble and then save as an Jpg on the largest mode .

2. Open saved Jpg's in Photoshop 6 and switch to Lab mode check the Lightness channel do the unsharp mask with the settings on 150 .02 3 and then convert back to RGB .

Should I save them as Tiff files or should I just try another lab I have over 10 gigs full of images on my hard drive and waiting to give to client .

These clients are not looking to have any thing printed larger than 8x10 and all the other shots will be printed in 5x7 size


Any help would be greatly apprecaited

Mike Ross

[GrahamClark]

I do not know exactly what your problem is but, when I have used a so called digital lab a couple of times the results have not been great, you need to try another lab, maybe buy a dye sub printer if you are in the money.at least try a couple of different options as well as looking at your camera.

If you are getting good prints out of your Epson printer, then the fault lies squarely with the mini-lab which you are using.

Although I am in the UK I use a company called Photobition in Glasgow to print my digital files and these are output via a Durst Lambda printer. I know Photobition are quite big in the States, so you might see if they have a lab in your locality.

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