Colour fringes on commercial prints

Please excuse me if I'm on the wrong forum but this is as close as I can get.

I just uploaded a couple of files from my D40 for commercial printing at 8 x 12 inches. When i got them back I

noticed quite nasty blue fringes around the edges of some pinkish flowers where they stand out against blue sea

and sky and easily visible at normal viewing distance. At first I thought it was CA in the lens but I printed

the image on my HP 6940 inkjet at A4 and it looks OK. I also looked on my monitor and any fringes there are can

be corrected by a shift of about 1.3 pixels - too small to see on such a print I'd have thought.

You can see the picture that caused the trouble in my little portfolio, though of course it's too small to see

fringes at normal magnification:

http://www.photo.net/photodb/member-photos?user_id=3810979

Has anyone had this on commercial prints? They also look over sharpened and the colour is off too - rather

yellowish. I've sent them back.

By the way is there an explanation around of how commercial digital prints are produced. I understand inkjets

and I understand traditional film negative-positive but not digital printing on what looks like photographic paper.

Many thanks,

Richard

Lab prints are mostly exposed using laser light, much like a color laser printer. It is possible that there is a registration problem, but I suspect your fringes are due to sharpening artifacts. I have noticed similar problems with CDs produced by the lab - a comparison you might make.

If you "drop off" images right out of the camera, you leave it to the lab operator to make all the adjustments. The tendency is to produce oversaturated and over sharpened prints, which probably look better to casual shooters.

If you balance the color, resize and sharpen, using a calibrated monitor and a color-managed work flow, you can usually get excellent results from a commercial lab. Once you have done the skilled work, simply request the print be made without adjustments (look on the back of the print for an "NNNN" stamp). It's best to submit JPEG images at the final print size, in the sRGB color space. At least make sure the aspect ratio is correct. If you want a non-standard size, adjust the Canvas size in photoshop to the print dimensions with borders. Be aware that borderless prints will crop a couple of millimeters from all sides.

Thanks for that Edward.

So far I've kept things very simple. I shoot JPEG with sRGB colour space paying attention to exposure and white balance when I take the pictures. Sometimes I do a little correction afterwards - levels, cropping, rotation to level the horizon etc. and then upload JPEG to the printers. Up until now I've been pretty happy with this and any difference in colour balance between camera monitor, my CRT monitor and the prints has been acceptable. Maybe I've just been lucky in the past or maybe I just got unlucky - I'll see when they send the reprints.

When you said "CDs produced by the lab" did you mean lab scans of colour film to CD? I've not had that done but I do recall fringes on minilab prints produced by a digital process from colour negative film. That was on 6x4 inch prints and it was a recently acquired Nikon 28-105 zoom - I though I'd just bought a heap of junk but it's actually quite good!