paddler4

Did you really mean to be so disparaging of the people who are taking the time to try to help you? No one was "pontificating". And they are also not theories. We were explaining the factors that determine whether the camera, which after all is just blindly following an algorithm without knowing what you want, will achieve focus. without your answers to our pontification, I wouldn't even know what similar problems are.

Lunch? Did I have lunch? hard to recall. But really, a simple comment that you aren't getting good focus provides no information that anyone can use to give you a meaningful answer to your question. AF is quite complicated, and how you use it and the circumstances in which you use it can determine whether you achieve focus even with a camera that is functioning perfectly. For example, AF will often be fooled if there is another high-contrast line near what you want to focus on. Even cameras that have AI-based functions to try to offset that--for example, a function that tries to find faces--can fail under some circumstances. So, some images, along with a description of how you had the AF set and how you used it is what's needed. For example, did you use a single small focus point? Or a single point with assist from adjacent points? Or a larger focusing area? Single shot or servo? Etc.

No, this is not a problem of insufficient edits. As numerous people have posted, it's just arithmetic. If the original doesn't have the aspect ratio (ratio of height to width) of 11 to 14, there are only three options: 1. Print it so that the length matches the paper stock. Depending on the image, that will either leave space top and bottom or crop top and bottom 2. Print it so that the height matches the paper stock. Depending on the image, that will either leave space right and left or crop right and left. 3. Distort the image by stretching whichever dimension is too short to match the paper stock. The best option is to do what YOU want to make it fit the aspect ratio of the paper stock before you send it in. I rarely use a lab for printing, but I would never send them a raw file. They will have no idea what you want the photo to look like. They will have to put it thorugh some rendering profile to make the photo viewable and printable, and you have no way of knowing what you will get. When you view a "raw" file on your computer, you are not really seeing the raw file; you are seeing the raw file as rendered by whatever software you are using to view it, using whatever that software has as a default profile. I'm surprised the lab will even take a raw file. Most require JPG, or sometimes JPG or TIFF.

I don't sell prints in this way, but looking forward: I think telling customers that you will work on them until they are satisfied is a bad idea, as it's too vague and open ended. I think you should also have a written return policy. Without that, you have to fall back on what is "reasonable", and as you can see from the postings here, people will disagree about that. And you and the customer are very likely to disagree. The wrong option only accounts for one of the several you printed, so it doesn't get you out of this mess. Unless there is a great deal of money involved, I personally would be inclined to be generous about this and write it off as a learning experience. However, I would not agree to any refund unless he returns all the prints. If he doesn't want to pay for the merchandise, he shouldn't keep it. You could make this sound generous, e.g., "I'm very sorry that you were dissatisfied with the prints. Please return them to me. Once I have received them, I will refund the full purchase price, and I will absorb the cost of my shipping multiple copies to you."

In Lightroom classic, this is simple. Click on the Y|Y button at the bottom left in the develop module, and click the box labeled "soft proofing" to the right of that. A split panel opens up, with the original on the left and the soft-proofing copy on the right. A new develop panel opens on the far right. At the top, click "create proof copy". That will create a virtual copy with soft proofing. When you set the correct ICC profile just below that, it will name the virtual copy with the name of the profile. You can have more than one of these. I often have soft-proof copies for two papers, and sometimes more.

But a totally different question from the costs of digital storage. Hardly surprising that a film camera, which has almost no parts vulnerable to degradation, would last longer. Even when the two have similar parts, they aren't really comparable; we worry about shutter life in digital cameras not because the shutters are not as durable, but because people take orders of magnitude more photos with digital. But on that different topic: good luck finding someone who is competent to fix an old film camera. I have a wonderful Canon FTb from 1972 that developed a problem many years ago, when I last used it. I vaguely recall that the metering didn't work right, but I have no recollection whether the shutter needed adjustment or the meter did. Until a few years ago, there was a good local camera repair shop that might have been able to fix it at a reasonable cost. No longer.

I don't rely on a photo site for storage, but I do make extensive use of my Smugmug site. I've seen no signs of their going under (knock on wood). However, it's much more expensive. They no longer have a bare-bones plan; currently, their cheapest plan is "portfolio", which I have. It's currently priced at $246/year.

I started out with f/1.4 primes when I was too young and naive to think about things except on a continuum of "quality". In contrast, currently, my fastest (and rarely used) lens is f/1.8, and my only frequently used lens faster than f/4 is my f/2.8 macro, where the extra light was useful primarily for focusing with an OVF. Everything else I have is f/4 and slower. I think the starting point should be: what do you shoot, and where do you shoot it? Many people do want very narrow DOF for what they do, but for what I do, I very rarely want DOF narrower than I get with f/4 on a FF camera. For example, even f/4 is narrow for 3/4 or full face candids. If I shot MFT, I would probably buy some f/2.8 lenses. I'm not young and carry my stuff around a lot, so the greater weight of faster lenses--sometimes twice the weight--would be a very big drawback. And, of course, there is the price. When I first bought an EF 70-200 L, the price difference between the f/4 and f/2.8 was roughly a factor of two. (The same was true of the weight.) Since the optical quality was similar, it seemed to me that f/4 was a no brainer. that was years ago. I'm now on my second EF 70-200 f/4, and I have literally never regretted the choice. I do a lot of night photography, but no astrophotography. For urban and landscape night photography, I never use even as wide as f/4. Re the better handling of low light with modern sensors: that's yet another reason. But keep in mind that in many cases, the choice is between an f/2.8 and an f/4. Even some years ago, a one-stop increase in ISO didn't usually matter much. For other people, my choices could be entirely wrong. All depends on what you do.

Only if you leave your HDD running 24/7. And if you are doing that, you are using a lot more electricity to run the computer it's attached to. Some people insist it's better to, but in decades of intensive use of computers (starting with the Apple II), I don't think I have ever encountered a problem arising from turning one off. If you turn it off, the cost of storage is vastly lower than even that. But to hijack the thread: even the annual consumption of the HDD alone would power my EV roughly 220 miles (354 km). Assuming 87W for a laptop and external drive, that's 2750 miles (4425 km) per year.

They shouldn't call this "color correction". It's quite misleading.

I almost always print my own, but in the rare cases when I use a lab, I use Bay Photo. They will print either with or without color correction. My recollection is that printing without their color correction, which is all I have ever used, is cheaper.

Some correct me if I'm wrong, but I have never understood why a scanner would be as good as a camera (Ed's suggestion) for this because the resolution of moderately priced photo scanners is so much lower. I use a Canon 9000F II scanner that has a resolution of 600 dpi, which is 23.6 dots per millimeter. The sensor of my camera (an R6 II, which is not high resolution by today's standards) is more than 7 times that. I use the scanner for photos, but if I ever get around to digitizing my huge collection of old slides, I'll use a camera. B&H sells a Vello slide and film copying aparatus similar to the Valoi that Ed mentioned, https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1760393-REG/vello_nsd_35_35mm_negative_and_slide.html. It's much cheaper and I suspect not as good, but it might get the job done.

Many thanks

Interesting. I looked at their site, and the stuff looks very well made but pricey. In addition to the "easy35", they sell an "easy35 slide holder" that the video says replaces the original holder in the easy35. They explain the benefits of the replacement but don't describe the original. Are you able to scan slides with the original holder?

I have always just popped in a new cartridge when the old one runs out and let the printing re-start. The worst case would be having to print that print again, but I don't recall ever having to, with any of my canon printers, which included in the past a 100. A count of dots would be useless because the number of dots per line of printing varies with the image and the type of paper.