[Dabhand16]

Another thing to remember is that the 'ordinary' printing service will usually mean that the machine will try to 'correct' anything it percieves to be out of the ordinary, and it will try to make everything average. Often the printer will produce prints that it 'optimises' itself.

For instance, if you deliberately wanted a blue tint on all of your pictures, and took them with either a blue filter, or appropriate white balance to produce the effect, the machine will read this as a blue cast and try to produce corrected photos.

Also, bearing in mind the inability of a screen to produce the whole colour range, this might account for the differences. Presuming you are shooting in jpeg format, check that your camera is not set to process the images to 'vivid'.

It is usually best to stick to the default settings in the camera untill you get a feel for how it will reproduce pictures. Then only adjust one setting at a time otherwise you will not know what is giving the better results.

I'm not 100% on this, but sharpening is something you would usually do to images for display on a screen rather than printing, because you are usually compressing them and also reducing the file sizes - for e-mail and web , for instance.