What about colo(u)rs

[Radu]

I've shot some images, balanced them in Lightroom3 to my (patrial) satisfaction and I prinded them in a printing lab. The colours printed are another kind of soup. How can I make sure that my work in balancing and twaking the colours is not wasted ?

[popo]

Buy a monitor colour calibration tool and use it. Find out the colour profile the printer uses and use that to preview.

[Citruspers]

I don't know too much about calibrating for print, but there are screen calibrators like the Spyder Express that can at least calibrate your screen properly. Then there's something called (soft) proofing you may wish to look into.

[Radu]

Thanks popo and Citruspers.
That means that I don't see what you see and vice versa.
I'll look into that.

[Mark.]

Yeah as the guys say, calibrate your monitor with a calibrator, it will save the calibrated profile for you, use that profile in your printers preferences for printing.

[Radu]

Thanks Orsan.
Does that mean that if I print it to a file using the calibrated profile the printing lab will use that and my pictures will come closer to what I want ?
From what I managed to learn up to now the paper used counts too in the outcome.
So if I want to see what my pictures look like I have to have the printer's profiles like the one's I have for my local printer.
What I see in Lightroom in the profiles window, a few that are my printers profiles with some codes that I suppose mean quality and /or paper type and 3 display profiles that I don't have a clue what they mean.
I'm a bit(gross understatement) confused, I must confess