Important: Color correction is only available on Portfolio and Pro accounts.
Even shots from great cameras won't produce perfect prints without adjustments.
It can come as a shock to most people when they discover their digital cameras can make them look red, especially with the built-in flash. Color correction to the rescue!
Color correction at SmugMug.
SmugMug offers what very few printing sites offer: the ability to turn off color correction. However, unless you adjust and edit your photos yourself and order test prints to verify your adjustments, we highly recommend enabling color correction.
We print through different labs, and they each handle color correction differently.
Fujifilm is the default lab covering the globe for our non-seller accounts except for Europe, Middle East, and Africa who are covered by Loxley.
Seller accounts can choose Bay Photo, Fujifilm, Loxley or WHCC as their printing lab. Opting for color correction increases the base price of each print, but the special attention provides excellent results that are very consistent.
Enable color correction.
Non-seller account levels, existing Basic and Power, do not have an option to use color correction. Color correction is off on these plans.
Seller account levels will see the choice available in their pricelists.
How does color correction work?
This type of automated correction is nothing like the simple quick-fix programs you see in desktop applications that wreck many photos.
The easy part: brightness and contrast.
The hard part: memory colors—skin, sky, and grass.
The automated color correction does what's very hard even for Photoshop wizards to do: it senses the areas of photos we're likely to judge them by, and it adjusts those regions to tones we expect to see.
FAQs
I'm a SmugMug subscriber. Does the Apply Color Effect tool I see in my photo tools menu have this sophistication?
Unfortunately, no.
If I'm printing black-and-white or sepia photos, should I enable color correction?
We recommend disabling color correction in this case because it's automated and optimized to improve color prints.
I'm a pro photographer with a SmugMug seller account. Should I pay for color correction through your pro labs?
It depends. If you enjoy adjusting all your photos, have soft-proofed using your chosen labs' ICC profiles, and ordered test prints to verify, then you may wish to turn color correction off. If you'd rather someone else do the legwork, you may find color correction is well worth it.