My Instagram photo of my new album (for all you Instageeks out there)
First, lets catch everyone up… to finish up a post I began on Facebook… here is the scoop-age:
“I got my new Shutterfly book of my engagement photos and the book turned out amazing. The materials, binding, and hardcover look awesome and the turnaround time was pretty good. My only disappointment was that all my greens were super over-saturated, so I did a little research and found out Shutterfly DOES in fact have a “disable auto-correct” feature. So, I will be writing a short blog post this morning explaining how to disable this to get your shutterfly orders looking exactly how you want them to! — at Bianca Portraits.”
This is going to be especially handy for people who are super anal about the way their photos look, and/or spend a lot of time making sure their photos look exactly right, either: when they shoot them, after post-processing on the computer, or have already color-calibrated their equipment just how they like it. If this sounds like you, and you love Shutterfly’s gorgeous photobook themes as much as I do (they are stinking adorable), this may be helpful!
Disclaimer: Depending on your experience taking/editing photographs, disabling this feature may or may not get the result you need from your photo printing. If you tend to use a Point-and-Shoot or stick with shooting in Automatic, the Auto-Correct feature is designed to correct for possible deficiencies in a more general purpose setting on a camera by boosting the colors, contrast, and brightening the photos. Leaving this on may make a positive difference in your final product. I, on occasion, shoot in automatic or use my iPhone for casual photos with family and friends and leaving this on saves me a lot of time adds a lot of extra “sparkle” to quickie photos. However, if you are using photos that have already been artistically “sparkled” in-camera or in post-production by yourself or someone else, you may want to give this a try. A good option is to do a test print with Shutterfly by ordering a single 4×6 photo, one with auto-correct enabled and one with it disabled, to determine what the best choice for your prints will be before you spend money on a full photobook.
Here we go with the “how-to”!
After you log into your free Shutterfly account…
1. Select Your Album (of already imported photographs)
2. Select “All”
3. Click the “Edit” tab
4. Select “Apply Effect”
This takes you into a whole new interface in which you could apply quick filters like “Black & White”, “Color Tone”, “Saturate”, or “Soft Focus”, or you could rotate your photographs, etc.
5. Check-box “Don’t apply automatic corrections to picture” to disable Shutterfly’s auto-correct function VividPics. More about VividPics®
6. Click “Apply this effect to selected pictures” to apply this disabled setting to your whole album.
THATS IT! It is a super easy feature that I wish I knew about before I ordered my book, but I plan to wait for Shutterfly to send me their ridiculous discounts in a few weeks (hint for new Shutterfly users: if you give them their business they reward you!) and re-order my book the way I intended it. I will write a follow-up post with the before and after pictures so you can see my results, and hopefully my mistake/discovery will save you wasted time and money! So check back in for my follow up post. I am very hopeful, because I have used the disable-auto correct feature with other labs (Costco Printing in particular) and was amazed at the difference that step makes in getting your images to look exactly like you intended them, but did not know Shutterfly offered this feature as well. I will let you know how it goes!
P.S. You can apply this disabled auto-correct feature to individual photos if you do not want the whole album affected… instead of selecting “All” when in your album, you can click through to pick and choose the ones you want, apply the effect, and click apply to all.
And of course… this would even be adorable for an indoor winter photoshoot. Can you imagine??
