🚀 go-pugleaf

Johnny,

Glad you liked the articles. Sending jobs to photo labs, in my experience, has been a "hit and miss" proposition. Unless you are dealing with a high end lab with some very capable operators, it's hard to know what you will get. I have taken jobs to labs and they just blow it through their system. If their system is set to auto adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc, that's what you get. A lot of labs "assume" your file is sRGB and treat it accordingly. Your best bet it to send a small print to various labs, but be sure to have measurable patches on the print somewhere (21 step grayscale) so you can see how they do. Of course, they is no guarantee the same job will print the same every time if another operator does things differently. I'd probably tag the file as sRGB for safety, which will work fine if it is monochrome. If you are sending grayscale files, you may wish to use gamma 2.2 as the space, but I haven't tried that with a lab, but that would seem to be the safest course.

If you happen to deal with a small, quality-minded lab, where you can talk to an operator who is knowledgeable about color management, you might actually get an accurate print. Even then, you have to communicate with them and make SURE they honor your profile, use a good custom profile, correct rendering intent, and don't invoke any "auto" adjustments. Since you are doing B&W, you may wish to try Perceptual Rendering Intent, which will fit the tonal scale to the paper, but I'd soft proof it first to be sure you like what you see on a carefully calibrated monitor. Of course, then you have to get the lab to figure out how to use Perceptual, which could be a challenge if they are clueless.

Even many commercial printers are clueless about color management, especially ICC workflows, but if they have a good file, and good inkjet proof, they can often give you a good result using whatever method they use (if they have good process control).

Best of luck,

Lou