I just got a phone call from one of my brides, she says her mom took the images to WalMart (I suggested taking the images to a local print shop over WalMart) to print some out and she could view and print the b&w images but not the color. The images on the DVD that they bought are CMYK/8 jpgs, is it not being read because of this format? Or another reason all together?

After i edited the picture, what is the best file format to save for pic printing, such as tiff, bmp, gif, jpg? A definition of print file formats for printing. Print File Formats. A PNG file can be saved with a transparent background which allows you to. For the best file format for giclee printing ready files of your photography or fine art consider PNG. Aug 06, 2005 after i edited the picture, what is the best file format to save for pic printing, such as tiff, bmp, gif, jpg?

Any help would be great. I am going to test them at my local WalMart and see if different settings (RGB) works, but any and all ideas of why this is happening would be great.

Thanks, Kate. Sometimes nomenclature is important - RGB and sRGB are not the same thing.

CMYK and RGB describe the color structure of an image file. There are a fundamental differences between the two. CMYK is subtractive color (for printing) and RGB is additive color (for display).

Black is represented in CMY by setting all colors to 100% and white by no colors (inks) which reveals the underlying paper surface. All the colors are affected by the color of the substrate. Since CMY black (process black) tends to come out brown, a fourth color, K = black, is frequently used to supplement CMY values. Where and how much K to use is an art rather than science. RGB is much simpler - black is no color, white is all colors at 100%.

What appears white on a monitor is actually an array of red, blue and green pixels very close together. In order to print an image, RGB must be mapped to CMYK, which is done by the print driver for home printers or by the press operator for a service bureau. For display on a computer monitor, CMYK must be mapped to RGB. Unfortunately there are no universal standards for this mapping process, hence we calibrate and profile our monitors and printing equipment. SRGB is a device-independent color space - a file which describes which color each 'number' in an RGB image file should represent.

Prashna Kundali Software here. Other color spaces include Adobe RGB (1998) and ProPhoto RGB. A CMS program (Color Management System) like Photoshop reads the color space embedded in a file and uses it to interpret the image so that the colors are displayed accurately.

If your software is not CMS-compliant, then sRGB files often look better on a monitor than other color spaces. Some minilabs are CMS, others apparently are not.

Wolf Camera does a good job on both sRGB and Adobe RGB files but my local WalMart works best with sRGB. If you don't know, then convert files to sRGB. I doubt that any minilab can convert CMYK files to a useable format.