Towards the end of the evening Pablo broke out the studio lights that he brought along and set them up in front of Jinx cafe. We posed several people there, and even the occasional fellow off the street. This is Aaron, Peter, Joe, and Jessica, if I recall correctly, from top left, clockwise.

Got the results back from Ofoto (Kodak Easyshare) today. Again, I was an idiot and didn't disable their image corrections, so this won't be a very level comparison. Even so, I'm not terribly shocked by the results. The photos are printed on glossy Kodak PerfectTouch paper (I don't think there's an option for matte). On the same printer, they even outputted a "cover sheet" with thumbnails of my photos and some order information. A nice touch.

Colorwise, yellows seem a bit more accurate compared to Walgreens, which had a bit of a red tint that I didn't notice until closer scrutiny. On the other hand, blues had an even stronger green cast, and skin tones similarly had some blue/green casting. B&Ws were nice and sharp, but were even more yellow than the ones from Walgreens. Most disappointing, however, was that there was an obvious "step" effect when you look really closely at curves, which is a result of over-sharpening. I'm willing to attribute both the incorrect colors and sharpening to the post-processing that I didn't specify to omit.

However, I was also a bit disturbed by the results from the more objective color and gradient charts. The Granger chart, which I believe displays the range of available colors, had some very strange irregularities that I can't quite describe. The gamut chart was slightly better in some areas and much worse in others. It's tough to tell, but on a positive note, the black to white gradient seemed a little more linear than the Walgreens ones. These were clearly nothing resembling actual photos, so I guess it may have made the PerfectTouch algorithms explode.

Lastly, a minor note, but they got closer dimension-wise to actually printing 4x6".

I also got an 8x12" print at Wolf Camera this evening. The guy was nice and printed it on the spot even though I arrived a few minutes after the lab "closed." I'm still not completely satisfied with the quality -- it's probably the most accurate I've seen, but came out a little too light for my liking (so I now know my photo wasn't too dark!) with a slight yellow/green cast.

Dropped off an order for the same 8x12" at Helix Photo right after. I talked briefly with the guy who took my order, a friendly gentleman named Lyn, and found out that they use Konica Minolta equipment and papers, which is a change from the Fuji and Kodak processes I've gotten. He also expressed a willingness to work with me and reprint in case I wasn't happy with the quality, and they strike me as a place that would actually put some care into making sure their work looked nice. I have pretty high hopes, and I'm looking forward to finding out tomorrow, along with the Yahoo/Target samples. If they do a good job, then they've earned a new customer.

Yes, I realize that no one read all this, but once I have all the results in I'll do a slightly more organized comparison page.