Valencia One Hour Photo

I visited Valencia One Hour Photo because it was the closest place to the golf tournament shoot I was doing. We needed to get the prints done in time for the dinner ceremony, so it was imperative that it be close. The guy at the counter told me it would be exactly an hour, and it was. I had hoped to get them faster but was ok with it since it still fit my timeline, though just barely.
When I went to pick up the prints, however, they were horrible. The colors were muted, yellow and faded looking, and all the highlights were blown out. I am not talking about a small amount only noticeable to a photographer. It was huge, they looked like no prints I had ever seen. They were also completely soft and lacked any detail whatsoever. The files I delivered were sharp and colorful.
The exposure was well within range to be printed nicely (my monitor is not calibrated to print, but it isn’t THAT far off and I’ve printed MANY times always with excellent results). This is a problem they should have caught and fixed, the fact that they didn’t means it wasn’t a surprise or they didn’t care.
Unfortunately I didn’t have any time to have them redone or to go somewhere else to have them done, so I took them and left and delivered them to the client. It was extremely embarrassing. It is possible that if I had complained that they would have redone them, but I didn’t have the luxury of time.
Do yourself a favor and test out any lab you plan on using in advance if you need to make tight deadlines. This event was 2 hours away or I would have. Or at least go to a lab with a Fuji Frontier. Those are harder to screw up. Though I can’t imagine that they printed that badly just from screwing up… their machine had to be in disrepair. I now have 180 people or so with disgusting looking prints sitting on their desks, and that is a representation of me as a photographer.