My Rite-Aid Experience

[noswall]

:?


Actually, it was a Walgreen's experience...

I shot some nice pictures of my newborn nephew with my Oly C5060-WZ. The camera was set on TIFF, resolution 2048 x 1536. I shot at 1/60 and F4.8 under fluorescent lights with one touch white balance. The file size is around 9mb. The picture looks great on-screen, but when I went to Walgreens to have an 8x10 made, there was a big ugly stripe across the picture. Since the girl at the photo counter thought that their machine was on the fritz, I mosied on down to Wal-Mart to try them, and guess what? Same problem! Has anyone ever heard of something like this?

[JimC]

No...

But, I've never tried to have a TIFF printed on the machines used by local printers. You may want to try converting the photos to JPEG (making sure not to overwrite the originals) and see if it's simply a problem with their software reading your TIFF files.

[Sivaram Velauthapillai]

yeah... as JimC points out, this looks like some sort of file format printing error... try with different file formats (like JPEG)...

Another possibility is the file size (although this generally isn't a problem). Maybe the printer is having problems with a 9meg file...

[JimC]

P.S. -- Almost any image editor can save your TIFF files as JPEG. You'll usually see an option that allows you to specify the file type when you use the "Save As" option in most editors. With JPEG Files, you can usually specify the quality, too (sometimes found under an Advanced Tab when saving).

If you don't have an editor that can do this, download irfanview from http://www.irfanview.com (it's free). Make sure to download the free plugins, too. Simply use the Save As option under the File menu after you open a file, specifying JPEG as the file type. You can also specify the JPEG Quality when saving (you'll see a slide bar for this purpose).

[noswall]

JimC wrote:

No...

But, I've never tried to have a TIFF printed on the machines used by local printers. You may want to try converting the photos to JPEG (making sure not to overwrite the originals) and see if it's simply a problem with their software reading your TIFF files.

Thanks for the tip, Jim, it worked like a charm! Comparing the quality between the TIFF (minus the stripe, of course) and the JPEG, I don't see any difference!