Please help! Grey-ish cast to image when printed

[cal1031]

I'm going nuts trying to get my images to print properly with good color. I have been editing in Lightroom and then opening in Photoshop where I apply a color boost action and sharpen. Then I convert to RGB 8bit and save as JPG.

The images look beautiful on my screen but sometimes when I upload and print them professionally they print with this terrible greyish cast/hue to them.

What am I doing wrong? I've tried to calibrate my monitor...does this have to do with color profiles or something? Is something lost in translation with Lightroom? I didn't seem to have this problem before LR...

[windrider86]

I am no expert here at all but have you tried calibrating your screen?
Or, cleaning the heads on your printer?

[dakwegmo]

Would you be willing to share the finished image? It might help to have some of us with color calibrated monitors check the jpg for the color cast.

[sybren]

What colour profile do you shoot in? sRGB? AdobeRGB? Something else? And what colour profile is the file in that you send to the printer? Do they know it's in this profile?

[oldwolf]

if your monitor is calibrated and your sending your images off to get printed then tell the photo lab to turn off auto color and density correction.

some labs do this automatically and it kills the image. found this out the hard way with a lab we tried.

[fletch]

Originally Posted by cal1031

The images look beautiful on my screen but sometimes when I upload and print them professionally they print with this terrible greyish cast/hue to them.

Hate to be pednatic but this is confusing me a bit. How can an image have a "grey" cast/hue? Grey doesn't have any colour, its neutral in color as it has equal RGB values for each channel. Is it really a colour cast of a contrast/brightness problem causing the photo to look dull and flat.

[cal1031]

I am discovering bit by bit that all of this has to do with color profiles...I was finally able to assign the sRGB profile to a file yesterday and it printed beautifully. Evidently Lightroom was tagging the images with the ProPhoto profile and messing things up.

(When i said they had a "grey-ish" cast, I basically mean that the printed images were extremely dull -- to me they looked like they were under a cloud of grey.)

For those of you who use Lightroom and Photoshop together, how do you handle color profiles? I have LR set to allow external editing in PS with sRGB 8-bit and I opened and edited all of my images sRGB in PS yesterday and saved as JPG's.

However, today when I open them again in PS they look terrible as sRGB but pop with their previous color when when ProPhoto is assigned as a profile.

Thanks for all of the input...eagerly await more replies!