wiredfool

I’d really like to praise snapfish here, but I just can’t. Their image quality is good, their website is functional enough, they have enough of an api for me to upload from my image workflow, but their fulfillment and customer service leave a little to be desired.

I ordered 80 reprints on 9/28. While ordering, I changed my shipping address. You can see where this might be going. A week later, when the prints didn’t arrive, I checked the order and saw that they were sent to my previous address. At this point, I’m not annoyed, bugs happen, and I can see how there might have been a race condition between changing my address and shipping the prints.

I opened a support ticket explaining that the pictures went to the wrong address. The response: wait for 10 business days to pass. I wait. No pictures. I respond, they say that the order must have been lost in the mail, and they need to confirm the (incorrect) shipping address. I respond, clearly stating for the third time that they shipped to the wrong address, and they should try the correct one.

A week later I prod them and they submit the order and ship it to the wrong address. In no part of this exchange did they ever seem to recognize that they shipped to the wrong address instead of the postal service not delivering.

I get the order confirmation 10 minutes before they close. 2 emails and a pone call later, I’ve got someone on the line who can do the intelligent thing and ship the prints to the right address.

It’s coming on a month since I ordered these prints. I don’t think that I’ll be ordering any more from Snapfish.

We went off to a different local coffee shop today, and had mixed results. The coffee was pretty good but we’re spoiled.

But the real mixed results were in the photos of the boy. (Why yes, we do take pictures of him in each coffee shop) Tungsten, compact fluorescent, and bright, reflected natural light. It’s enough to make you want to blow it all away with a flash. But despite actually using the flash outside today for the blue picture, I wasn’t into using it indoors.

So I gave Adobe Lightroom a workout to see if I could get something useful, and I came up with something that’s a lot better than it was, pretty much splitting the difference between tungsten and fluorescent, but it’s leaving the natural light highlights a little blue.

All in all, I’m mixed on lightroom. It’s certainly better than trying to make the changes in something less specialized. I like that I don’t need to import everything into it, so my workflow isn’t impacted too badly. But I do need to try out Aperature.

Before:

After: