OT - Photo Printing

[Ozz]

We had some family photos taken (in conjunction with "senior photos" for son) and the photographer did all the editing and retouching, and provided digital copies to us. My wife (who arranged all this) has now tasked me with figuring out how to get some good prints made.

Naturally, my first thought was to turn to the Paceline brain-trust ;)

I would imagine there is an online service for this...

Does anyone know of a reputable service that does this?

Other advice / recommendations is also appreciated!

[Jaybee]

My wife uses Shutterfly to print a book of her photos of our daughters every year. Been happy with the quality so far.

[jmoore]

I send most of mine to Walgreens for printing. They are generally quick and the quality is fine.

[dbnm]

Costco makes some shocking good prints.

[thermalattorney]

AdoramaPix (http://adoramapix.com/). Awesome results on real Kodak photo paper.

Tip: If the photographer has retouched them, then you can uncheck the "auto retouch" option during checkout.

[mhespenheide]

I take photography far too seriously, and make prints for myself and my own walls at Costco (using their own profiles specific to the location and printer used). If you're not going to profile the printer, though, you won't get that last 5-10% accuracy.

[Ozz]

...If you're not going to profile the printer, ....

what does this mean?

Thx

[benb]

If you need to ask what profiling the printer is just send your pictures to shutterfly or something and be happy with whatever comes back. If the photos already came from a pro photographer you're easiest bet is to just pay them to do the prints if they offer that service.

Dealing with printer profiling is WAY into the weeds of running a fine art level print studio. It's pretty pointless unless you've decided to buy into pro level printer, really nice monitors on the machine, and you have a high quality profiling device. I have a $600 profiler and it's very involved/difficult to use it to profile a new paper/ink combo.

If you buy a printer and stick to the recommended paper from the manufacturer you shouldn't need to mess with profiles as long as you've calibrated your screen correctly and have all the software configured correctly, which is non-trivial. (The key being software managed print profiles vs printer managed profiles generally.)

A lot of print houses don't even deal with doing their own profiles.. they hire an IT firm that specializes in keeping the printers running to come in and configure the computer and everything for them. I have also gone into labs and they were doing test prints for me because the print I was asking them to do was > $100 and they generally offer a proof sample of a section of the photo. At least once when their samples sucked given the quality of the printer they had I got invited back to see their setup and quickly realized they had an incompetent setup compared to the hardware they bought. They were using 3rd party ink in a $4000 printer without the correct profiles since they were trying to save money on ink, than the tech attempting manual adjustments in photoshop to get the color matching to work. After the tech produced 5 useless samples I gave up and never got anything printed there.

I've done quite a bit of printing from BayPhoto.com and some of these were really expensive right and they take care of getting that right as long as your file doesn't have some embedded incorrect profile information. They have you tag the photo with sRGB or something else standard and they take care of converting to whatever the printer they select uses. I trust them with prints that cost over $100... I've done a 5-foot wide metal print through them, that was very expensive and they got it right the first time. And they stand by their work to a degree they will make you whole if they screw up.

The one time I've seen them screw up was I ordered 2 Canvas prints that were about $100 each. Instead of sending me 1 each of the 2 photos they sent me 2 of 1 photo. They let me keep the extra and rushed the correct one back to me. They're a really good option for a lab that caters to professional use cases but allows any consumer to sign up.

I've never used Costco... if you have to ask them what printer they have and then go find the profile yourself for it on the internet I would probably not bother with that.. the profiles are specific to the paper + printer combo. Any lab high enough quality to mess with profiling should be handling that themselves. You give them an sRGB/AdobeRGB/ProPhotoRGB tagged image and they select the correct profile for their printer + paper combo you selected and then they do a proof check in their software.

[mhespenheide]

Benb has a more thorough explanation of some of the background details, but profiling the printer is the way to ensure that the colors you're seeing on the screen match the colors coming out of the printer as closely as possible.

I should have put more thought into my last sentence, but -- as Benb implies -- if you don't know what profiling is, you almost certainly don't need it. I do care about that last bit of accuracy, so I do profiile my prints, and when I make prints through Costco I tag my file with the specific profile of the specific printer at the specific Costco I'm using.

My greater point was that Costco makes prints that are good enough to go up on my own walls, and I'm overly picky about that kind of thing, so I recommend them for regular people too.



Tl;dr: I threw out a term that was unnecessarily complicated for regular people.

[Elefantino]

My wife used Fracture for some of our Giro photos from last year. They did a real nice job.

[jruhlen1980]

I've never been happy with Walgreens etc. I'm told it has to do with the difference between printing color ink on photo quality paper vs. actually developing prints. I don't know if that's true or not.

Anyway I've had good luck with Mpix.com

[Brendan Quirk]

I've used them all -- drugstores, Target, Shutterfly -- then things changed a WHOLE lot for the better when I started using Nations Photo Lab. I am massively impressed. Colors are richer, paper is much better, etc etc. I don't think it's much more costly. Can't say enough about how much I like using them -- https://www.nationsphotolab.com

[false_Aest]

I used to linearize and profile printers for a living and did a lot of custom work for some big name photographers.

80% of people can't tell the difference between a "good looking print" and an accurate print.

If you're not doing custom stuff, Costco gets you 80% there 80% of the time.

Your local drugstore kiosk will suck 90% of the time.

You want super awesome prints? The Icon in Los Angeles makes them. You will pay for it.