Oh, and....

[kyrielle]

I can now recommend Ofoto without reservations for those who want prints from digital (or digitized) photos. The prints I got originally were excellent, except for the 8x10 that looked like it had been nailed by a chemical error and had a yellowed line on it.

They offered the option to return it for a refund to my credit card or in "store credit". (You can do this within 30 days with any photo; if it's for damage or problems they introduced, you get the cost of postage back as well, but even if it's just "I don't like it", you can still get the cost of the photo back.) I scrawled on my form that I'd take store credit, but I'd like it even better if they just sent me a reprint of the photo without the error.

I received notification that they'd received it and a new order was being prepared; less than three hours later, they sent an email that the order had been prepared and shipped. No cost to me, but now I would get (hopefully) a good print.

I have that print now. No yellow lines. No flaws. Shipped at the same rate as before, and arrived within a week of their receiving my return. They were fast, they were courteous, and they did not make me re-enter my order using the "store credit" I would have gotten, but processed from my request on the form.

Color me thrilled. Couple that with the technical excellence in all the un-damaged photos (including this one now), and they have a customer who will come back, and do so happily.

Comments

[canyoncat.livejournal.com]

I have been using ShutterFly but I will give Ofoto a try next time around. If you recommend them I know they must be good. Just curious... what was the image size/quality setting for the 8x10?

[kyrielle]

I used a 1600x1200 JPG, which is the best resolution my camera offers. The photo that resulted is utterly gorgeous.

I tried Shutterfly and Ofoto both, and compared the results a while ago. I didn't like Shutterfly as much, because the colors weren't right. They seemed to want to make things more vivid/colored, with the result that it didn't look like the photo actually looked on my computer, or like the scene actually looked. Ofoto seems to produce the photograph more faithfully, which is what I wanted.

Re:

[canyoncat.livejournal.com]

My camera has a high end of 1600 x 1200 as well and I've got a couple of 8 x 10s from Shutterfly that look good. I was just wondering if you were shooting with more pixels.

[kyrielle]

Oh, no doubt, no doubt. Most (all but 1 of my test set of around 8 or 10) of my pictures from Shutterfly look good. But, the 1 that doesn't looks REALLY tacky; of the ones that look good, several are off in the colors. Shutterfly made them more vivid than in the original picture, and in some cases, just added them. (On the picture I used on this post, they couldn't seem to stand that much of the moss didn't look green, for example.)

The color values were just off. In the case of one picture, of the pasture out back of my house, it made the picture much MORE gorgeous than the original was. But my problem is very simple: if I decide to order a picture, I want to receive a print that looks like my picture. I want to be able to predict what I'll get. And with Shutterfly, I couldn't.

I'm not sure I would have realized they were doing that, except:
(1) The picture they made the lavender fog even MORE lavender in. It had already been painfully dramatic, now it was a caricature.
(2) I ordered the same set of prints from Ofoto at the same time. When I compared them and saw the differences, I went back to the originals on my drive and also compared to those. The Ofoto were true; the Shutterfly were dramatized, in some cases (not just the really bad one, but others) to the detriment of the picture.

Whether it improves or worsens the picture, I don't care. It's not a faithful reproduction, and I therefore do not trust their services.