Christina Keddie

Gabriela, use a different browser (Firefox, Chrome), or turn off the autofill on your Safari. 

OK, first: are you sure that your files are in sRGB?  Go through *every* single step of this troubleshooter: http://www.damiensymonds.net/art_tscs000.html

Second: once you're confident you sent sRGB files to your lab to print, then grab those sRGB prints and follow Damien's instructions to properly calibrate your screen.

Can you explain what the difference is between what you see on your screen and what you see in a print?  

Also: if you're seeing a difference between your screen and a print, then you're not properly calibrated, I'm afraid.  Have you followed Damien's instructions on calibrating your screen?  http://www.damiensymonds.net/calibration.html

Are you using the right actions?  Damien's web actions include a watermarking step to automate that entire process.  And if you read all the instructions, he covers using Image Processor to run the actions so you never have to open a single file in PS. 

http://www.damiensymonds.net/act_web.html

Are you confident that this file is in fact a JPG, and not a PSD file saved with the .jpg extension?  What happens when you try to open the file in your Windows Explorer folder -- does it open as a JPG in a photo viewer program, or does it open in PS?  (I've made this error before when I went to save a file in PS and clicked on another similar file name to make it easier to save, but didn't actively choose JPG from the drop down list of file types.)

Prints from a pro lab are the objective standard -- whatever your lab prints is how it reads your files.  That's how you'll establish a good baseline with your monitor calibration.

Follow Damien's calibration instructions, which tell you to get your prints BEFORE calibration.  Once you get those prints back, then you can confirm that your monitor is showing you exactly what you'll see in your prints.  If your prints are horridly blue, for instance, you'll want your calibration to make your monitor show you exactly the same kind of horrid blue.  Then (and only then!) you can be confident that when you edit the file, you're seeing it properly -- so when you take that horrid blue file and warm it up and edit it so it looks good on your screen, you can be confident that you're seeing it correctly while editing and that when you print the file, it will look as you see it on your screen.

I'd encourage you to read up on what contributes to the depth of your focal plane.   There are a ton of free depth of field calculators online that will let you put in numbers and figure out how much of your photo will be within your focal plane (i.e., in focus).

Three basic factors:

- aperture (the wider your aperture, the shallower your focal plane)
- focal length (the longer your focal length, the shallower your focal plane)
- distance to subject (the closer you are to your subject, the shallower your focal plane)

Here, you were at a fairly wide aperture (f/3.2), at a middle-normal focal length (50mm), and I'm guessing you were super close to your subject.  That gave you a focal plane that was too shallow to have both eyes in focus.

If after you took this photo you checked it on your LCD screen and zoomed in to check your focus, and noticed that your focal plane was too narrow for what you wanted to achieve, you'd have three options: narrow your aperture, use a wider focal length, or get farther away from your subject. 

Or recognize that your focal plane, however narrow or deep it is, is a "slice" of the scene in front of you that is perpendicular to your camera.  In other words, if you want to use a super shallow DOF *and* get both eyes in focus, angle yourself such that both of your subject's eyes are the same distance from your camera, so they'll both fall within the focal plane.

5 hours ago, Samantha LaRue said:

 

While that is the correct size, I've had better luck cropping to that ratio (851:315) - and then resizing to 2048px on the long side. This seems to look better across all devices, whereas resizing to the exact size can make it look bad on mobile. 

 

This is exactly what I do!    Anything less than 2048 on the long edge looks utter crap on mobile.

Also, the display size of FB cover photos **for groups and pages** seems to now be 828x315, so you'll have a little bit cut off the sides if you design specifically to the 851:315 aspect ratio.  I can't find anything concrete about this from FB (one or two forum posts and articles making this claim, like this one and this one), but I have noticed the edges being slightly cropped on my biz page cover photos.

Oh man, Robbie, you've been struggling with this for almost a year now! 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/195567190503489/permalink/979898715403662/

If you could answer Damien's question about transparency (and maybe also show us a screenshot of your logo PSD with all of its layers), hopefully we can finally sort this out for you.

2 minutes ago, carriewilson990 said:

When I send the files to clients they are flat , too. Not for sure what to do 

Are they viewing the files in color-managed programs?  Do they have calibrated monitors?

1 hour ago, carriewilson990 said:

I have a hp laptop with Windows. When I save a photo in Photoshop to file folder in Windows then open the file the photo looks flat.

Windows photo viewer isn't color-managed, so you can't judge based on what anything looks like in that program.

I agree with Damien.  Clear up hard drive space, run a cleanup program, and for the love of God, restart your computer.    If this problem persists after that, then do come back and we can try troubleshooting, but you've got to get those basics squared away first.

This file is untagged RGB.  Looks like you've got a major color space problem -- go through this to fix it.

You push the button that corresponds to the arrow in the strip along the bottom -- presumably they line up exactly with a physical button, yes?  So in your first screenshot, push the button that corresponds to the appropriate menu item.  Then in the second screenshot (once you're inside a menu,), push the up and down buttons to select the lefthand menu item you want, then push the "enter" button to select it, then push the up and down arrows to select the individual line that you want, then push the "enter" button to select it, and then push the up and down arrows to get to brightness, contrast, etc., and push "enter" to select the line you want, and then push the button corresponding to the direction you want each slider to go.

8 hours ago, Samantha LaRue said:

What does this mean?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=horses+for+courses

You always always always WANT that to be checked.    Editing in sRGB is all well and good, but unless you embed that color profile into your file when you save it, it does you no good for your output files.  Always embed sRGB into all your output JPGs.

And if you want Damien to get the affiliate credit, you would buy using his affiliate links here: http://www.damiensymonds.net/art_monitor.html

Neither of the two you're looking at are on his list, though -- so you could also always just use the handy "Donate" button down here at the bottom of this page to buy him a few beers. 

Right here.

It looks like you straightened the image and extended the canvas to account for the new angle of the photo?  If that's in fact the case, then PS added the new canvas on the edges in whatever color you had selected as your background swatch at the time.

Whatever it is you did to the image, you did to the image -- it's not part of the pasteboard (or background) of PS.  It's on the file itself.  So walk yourself back -- did you extend the canvas or rotate the image at all?

I would think that focal length only matters (for the subject elements) insofar as it impacts the DoF of each element.  Background compression is irrelevant for the subject elements.  I would play around with focal length for the background elements to see whether you can use distortion or compression as a compositional tool, but using the same focal length for all the different-sized elements seems unnecessarily complicating to me. 

This is a pretty good explanation of the state of US copyright law and old photographs: http://www.legalgenealogist.com/2012/03/06/copyright-and-the-old-family-photo/

The relevant point: for any unpublished photograph (and simply taking a photo and selling it to an individual doesn't count as publication under US copyright law) created after 1923 and before January 1, 1978, the copyright lasts for the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years.

What country are you in, and what country were these old photos taken in?

I don't know what to tell ya, then, because that's never happened in any version of LR or PS I've used.   And anyways, that's an absurdly redundant workflow -- the LR raw processor is the *exact same* as the ACR raw processor.  So just do all your raw processing in one and then bring the file into PS for your targeted edits.

(And no mucking about with the finished PSD or TIFF file in LR when it's back!  LR at the end only for workflow management purposes, like batch renaming and saving your files!)

...That shouldn't have happened.  You do your raw processing in LR, and then when you right-click and choose "edit in" to send it over to PS, all those raw processing edits are applied and the file opens directly into PS.

Have you been going back and forth multiple times between LR and PS, opening versions with and without LR adjustments applied?

Glad you figured out the file access thing!

What do you mean by camera raw not opening before getting into PS?  When you're sending a file over from LR?