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Mar. 20th, 2007 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickHere is the promised comparison between WalMart's Kodak Kiosk and Winkflash. Since I am comparing photographs, there will be bandwidth-eating stuff below the cut. Don't clickit if you would like to avoid that.
In the first batch, we have the boy at the beach and the ostrich. Winkflash is on the LEFT, Kiosk is on the RIGHT. Note cropping of boy's head and ostrich's head. I did NOT chop off their fucking heads, the photo printing did it for me. Yeah, that's service. Way to make my pictures look their very best!
Look closer at the boy to get a real feel for what "auto-enhance" does to the colors.
The boy is blond. He is fairskinned and not-at-all tan. The picture on the RIGHT, the one that looks like it might actually be the boy, that's the Winkflash one. And the ostrich in the rather blurry picture we started with? It's the one that I cropped for this picture:
Because the Kiosk was jacking the colors, the boy (and the ostrich) lost nearly all detail in the not-very-lit side as it graded more towards black to make the colors "more vivid". This pissed me off 'cause I like detail and fuck it all, things looked BETTER in my real version instead of their stupid jacked version.
Here we have the waterlily and the fruit-in-Amsterdam. Again, Winkflash is on the LEFT, Kiosk is on the RIGHT. (The flare in the lower right-hand corner of the Kiosk waterlily is flash reflection, not bad printing.) Cropping, I think we can all see that. On the waterlily picture, the loss of the surrounding wet-looking leaves really hurts (IMHO, and I am the fucking customer, here) the picture. Jacking the color makes the lily not match the leaves, which it really kind of did. It looked like it belonged to them. The warmer, less-blue pink that the Kiosk made, it doesn't look like the real thing.
On the fruit picture, the cropping ruined my (not-very-good-in-the-first-place) framing effort to put the wacky pink fruit in the middle, with partial baskets of other stuff all around. At least on the Winkflash one you can see I made an effort to frame. The colors were wild enough in real life that I don't think they needed to be made all PlaySkool. Look at the Kiosk limes, in particular. They weren't like that.
Maybe all of this is just me, and remember that I did pick the examples to illustrate my issues with the Kiosk. This was not a random sampling. This was the selection of photographs that I thought suffered the most from the Kiosk "improvement" efforts. Normal people will probably have no trouble with getting their damn pictures printed at the kiosks in Wal-Mart.
In the first batch, we have the boy at the beach and the ostrich. Winkflash is on the LEFT, Kiosk is on the RIGHT. Note cropping of boy's head and ostrich's head. I did NOT chop off their fucking heads, the photo printing did it for me. Yeah, that's service. Way to make my pictures look their very best!
Look closer at the boy to get a real feel for what "auto-enhance" does to the colors.
The boy is blond. He is fairskinned and not-at-all tan. The picture on the RIGHT, the one that looks like it might actually be the boy, that's the Winkflash one. And the ostrich in the rather blurry picture we started with? It's the one that I cropped for this picture:
Because the Kiosk was jacking the colors, the boy (and the ostrich) lost nearly all detail in the not-very-lit side as it graded more towards black to make the colors "more vivid". This pissed me off 'cause I like detail and fuck it all, things looked BETTER in my real version instead of their stupid jacked version.
Here we have the waterlily and the fruit-in-Amsterdam. Again, Winkflash is on the LEFT, Kiosk is on the RIGHT. (The flare in the lower right-hand corner of the Kiosk waterlily is flash reflection, not bad printing.) Cropping, I think we can all see that. On the waterlily picture, the loss of the surrounding wet-looking leaves really hurts (IMHO, and I am the fucking customer, here) the picture. Jacking the color makes the lily not match the leaves, which it really kind of did. It looked like it belonged to them. The warmer, less-blue pink that the Kiosk made, it doesn't look like the real thing.
On the fruit picture, the cropping ruined my (not-very-good-in-the-first-place) framing effort to put the wacky pink fruit in the middle, with partial baskets of other stuff all around. At least on the Winkflash one you can see I made an effort to frame. The colors were wild enough in real life that I don't think they needed to be made all PlaySkool. Look at the Kiosk limes, in particular. They weren't like that.
Maybe all of this is just me, and remember that I did pick the examples to illustrate my issues with the Kiosk. This was not a random sampling. This was the selection of photographs that I thought suffered the most from the Kiosk "improvement" efforts. Normal people will probably have no trouble with getting their damn pictures printed at the kiosks in Wal-Mart.
