Why the photo in my computer screen and the photo after copy are different?

Question

The photo in my laptop are good color and bright and the photo after copy from costo are not the same and look more darker than my laptop and not good.Is there any advice?

Answer 1

The photo stores are different, so try another one. If you have any type of photo program on your computer try lighting them up before sending to Costo.

Answer 2

Because the colour reproduction of your laptop screen and costco's printers are not the same.


The colour reproduction of any system is limited by the primary colours it uses.

For your laptop screen you have a whitish backlight that is then passing through the LCD material and then red, green or blue filters. The LCD material controls the amount of light that goes though each filter, so it can produce any colour from the combination of those colours.

However, it can not produce a more saturated red than the red of the filter. Laptops generally have very poor colour reproduction due to the poor saturation of the colours - greater saturation means that they each produce less light so the image is dimmer, so to produce a brighter image the filter colours are desaturated.

LCD monitors are better. Instead of desaturating the colours they can increase the backlight brightness as they do not have the power constraints a laptop display has.

CRT monitors are better still, but even then they can only reproduce about 2/3 of the colours that a human can see.


All the same problems apply to printers too, but from the colours of the inks.

So, when you take a digital picture, the colour of the light is broken down into red green and blue according to the filters in the camera, and stored as digital information.

You then look at that information on your laptop, which takes what the camera thinks it saw and puts it though the filters in your screen. You alter the digital information it so that it looks good on the screen, and then take to to be printed where the printer is limited by the ink colours it has available.


I would be much more surprised if the photo and your laptop looked the same.