It's not that the books tend to print dark, but actually two other issues.
1) Most people send jobs to print from the iPhoto book tools without calibrating their monitors. Most people have their monitors set with the brightness all the way up, which is one of the things that's adjusted when you calibrate your monitor.
2) The color range or "gamut" of the commercial printers that make the books and calendars and such isn't as wide as that of photo printers in general, so colors that would otherwise have some level of detail go right to black. That tends to pull down the tone of the image and make it look darker.
3) Printer profiles for the commercial printers used by iPhoto aren't available anywhere so you can't convert the profile first to see how it would look as a soft proof, makes it hard to adjust.
If you've already got your images in iPhoto and want to adjust them a bit before sending them (which is a great idea) there's no reason to round trip them through LR/Aperture/Photoshop. You've already got an image editing program and an exposure adjustment in iphoto will do the trick.
|