What are the pros and cons of lab prints versus using a printer?

Question

As newcomers to photography and printing we would like advice on the best way(s), regarding both quality and cost, of printing. In the main my wife is photographing birds and insects, so natural colour and clarity are paramount. I have had one recommendation to a previous question for a photo lab (Photobox), thanks James. I was just wondering if any one else can give me advise?

Asked by Dennis

Answer

Jrista's article is an excellent explanation of the cost of making these prints. It's actually quite a bit cheaper than I'd expected.

I'm just starting to make my own prints using my new Canon Pixma Pro9000 printer. I must say the results are stunningly beautiful and pop out of the printer with very little effort once I figured out how to load the paper.

Here are a couple of notes on cost that are worth noting.

First, if you are willing to settle for the Pro9000 instead of the Pro9500, it can be had very inexpensively if you check the "used" area of Amazon. Just look for the Pro9000 in Amazon and note the "new and used from $199" part of the page.

What you will find is that there is a whole secondary market in these machines thanks to the $400 rebate provided with the purchase of the printer with a new Canon DSLR. It turns out a lot of people want these rebates and then resell the printers once the rebates are collected. So even if you are a Nikon shooter like me, you can easily buy these printers for about $250 delivered. This makes the Pro9000, in my opinion, an unbeatable deal for anyone who has even a marginal desire to own a great photo printer.

A major benefit of printer ownership is that the marginal cost of making a print goes way down. Take Jrista's example of someone who buys the printer and uses it once a month. His first print, including the monthly amortization of the printer cost, costs $10 (if we count the printer as costing $250 instead of $700+ as in his example). But any subsequent print he wants to make costs only about $6 ($3 for paper and $2.80 for ink). A print from a lab will cost about $13, so he is actually paying much less than what a lab would cost, as long as he makes at least one print a month.

A reasonable scenerio in my case might be to give prints as Christmas gifts to ten of my friends, and then printing one print a month for the rest of the year. This would mean I would make about 22 prints in a year. If I amortize my printer over three years, that's $83 a year, plus $127 for making the 22 prints. So it costs me a bit over $200 a year, or less than $10 per print. This is considerably cheaper than a photo lab, and my prints come out of the printer instantly, which is partiuclarly useful during the Christmas season when photo labs are bound to be very busy and thus slow.

One really interesting consequence of purchasing your printer is that you should really act as though the printer didn't cost anything at all when making your calculations. Why? Because you should encourage yourself to make prints whenever you have even the slightest desire for them.

The reason for this is that if you leave your printer idle for long periods, you are risking ink clogging, which uses a lot of ink to resolve. You would be better off using this ink to make prints! Unless you are printing photos for a living, it's highly unlikely that you can overload your printer's duty cycle.

So don't say your print cost $10 including the cost of the printer. Say it costs under $6, and make as many prints as you would want to have at that price.

Incidentally, I found Canon's Photo Paper Platinum at $12.99 per 10 sheets, including shipping. So my paper costs about $1.30 and my ink (presumably from his example) around $2.80. So my 13x19 print costs only about $4.10. Your mileage may vary, as always, but look around for deals and you may find photo printing considerably cheaper than you might think.

Answered by n/a

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Is there a printing lab that post prints direct to customer without the invoice?

Question

Is there an online printing service, (like photobox) that I can use to print and ship prints directly to customers so that I don't even handle them. If I use a normal online printing service, they will send an invoice. Since I will be charging the customers more than I pay for the prints, is there a service that doesn't send the invoice?

Bonus points if they send the prints with my branding instead of theirs.

Bonus bonus points if they have labs in multiple major countries (USA, UK etc). Otherwise, just listing a companies in each country is fine

This isn't for printing wedding photos or anything important like that, just general quality, mass market snaps.

Asked by matt burns

Answer

Have a look at http://www.pwinty.com

This in an API for printing and shipping photos, and offers worldwide shipping.

They let you specify your own custom branding, and invoices to be included within the package- sounds like exactly what you are after.

Answered by user9021

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Where can I have photos printed in bulk at wholesale prices?

Question

I would like to sell prints of my photos, does anyone have know of any suppliers that print photos off in bulk? Ideally based in the UK but I would also consider printers abroad.

I don't want to use sites like PhotoBox, Snapfish because the margins will be lower.

Asked by IconicDigital

Answer

Try ProAm Imaging, based in Bradford. I haven't used them personally but have heard good things, and they have apparently won awards. 52p each for 8x10" prints. Sell them for £5 each and you're laughing!

Answered by ElendilTheTall

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What does it mean to “mount” slide film for processing?

Question

I just finished my first roll of a 35mm slide film and it is time to get it processed. I checked few places online and the options are to get them processed "mounted" or "unmounted".

So what do these places mean by mounting a film for processing and how does it change the quality of final output?

Answer

You can have slide film processed like normal film, left in long strips, or more commonly they are individually cut into single frames and mounted in a cardboard or plastic holder, which keeps them flat, and these mounted slides can then be put in a cartridge of a slide projector. The mounts can be seen here.

The processing is exactly the same, so no difference in quality. The mounting is done after the film is processed and dried.

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Should I have my lab color correct my images?

Question

The labs that I deal with to get my images printed offer the option to color correct my images prior to printing. One example of what they do is:

Per file color correction is available. We color correct the entire file for balanced skin tones without causing blown out or color casted highlights.

Is it a good idea to have them do this? When is or isn't it a good idea? Am I taking away my creative abilities or am I giving the images a 2nd opinion before printing? Do you find that they only correct skin tones, what if I have a landscape image? Experiences would be appreciated.

I am not talking about this kind of online color correction: Which online color correction services give good results?

Answer

Letting the lab do color correcting (assuming its a good lab that does good job with color correction) is like using the auto mode on your camera - the lab will make sure everything comes out ok and correct the obvious mistakes but you will lose creative control.

This will help with family photographs edited on non-color-profiled screen but probably a bad idea for fine art, pros or any picture with anything special (deliberate under or over exposing, extreme color effects or even an unedited photo of a subject with unusual colors)

Edit: dpollitt's comments got me thinking - if your output is only prints (not digital files) it makes perfect sense to outsource the tedious and thankless job of color correction to the lab - especially if you are a pro and you can earn more money when taking pictures then when color correcting them.

but:

1. If your output is digital files + prints you have to do the color correction yourself anyway fro the digital version so there's no point in letting the lab do it.

2. If you want consistency and repeatability (that is, be able to re-print the image and get exactly the same printed image) then you can't let the lab do it - you can't be sure you will get the same technician and that the technician will make the same choices if you reprint months or years from now.

3. If the picture is not a standard "well exposed" middle-of-the-road image then you can't let the lab co color correction because they don't know what you want to picture to look like (and this will probably completely throw off any automatic correction they might use ).

So - if you are a pro (as in get paid for taking photos), you're main product is prints and you don't sell or care about digital versions (point 1) and you don't care about reprints (point 2) and you take boring pictures (point 3) then you should absolutely let the lab color correct your pictures.

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How did my Portra 400 color negs came back black and white?

Question

I was trying out Kodak Portra 400 color negative 120 film in my Hasselblad 503cw last month.

Just got the negs back from the lab and they appear to be black and white.

Can someone explain how this is possible?

Answer

They may have been "souped" in the wrong chemistry. For all the differences between colour and black-and-white films, they are, at heart, the same thing. The colour films simply have extra bits of chemistry, both in the film itself and in the developing chemistry, that adds colour to what is really just a black-and-white image.

In black-and-white photography, you simply cause metallic silver to precipitate out of silver halides that have been made reactive by exposure to light, then get rid of the remaining silver halides in the fixing process. In colour films, there are dye precursors that attach to the silver, and in the "blixing" process, the remaining halides and unattached dye precursors are removed ("fixing" the image) and the metallic silver is removed as well ("bleaching" the image), leaving only the dye clouds.

If the silver is not removed (that is, if there's something wrong with the bleach/fix bath, either due to depletion or an incorrect mixture) you will get a sort of colourized black-and-white image; if the developer chemistry does not convert the dye precursors to dye clouds (that is, if the chemistry used is a black-and-white developer rather than the usual C-41 chemistry), then you'll get essentially the same result as with with a black-and-white film (but with a colour cast to the negative).

If it were the film at fault (let's say, for argument's sake, that the part of the dye that lives in the emulsion went missing during manufacture), then the blixing process would have removed the silver, leaving no dye clouds behind, and your negs would have been either blank or just the faintest ghostly traces of density.

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Scratches on negatives - me or them?

Question

I've recently dug out my old SLR camera again. I've just got the prints and scans back from a reputable high-street company and I'm not very impressed with the results.

For example:

There's a big vertical scratch in the negative on the right side of this crop and also some small blotches in the top left corner. The scratch on the right of the image is a scratch on the negative itself and corresponds exactly with a dip in the edge of the negative. I can't make out the blobs on the negative though, although they may be too small for my eyes! There are other similar examples on both this film and other films from the same batch.

My suspicion is that somebody or something in the lab did a hatchet job on the negatives whilst cutting them and the negatives were still wet whilst scanning and printing. I don't see how it could be my camera body, or dirt causing it given the direction of the marks in relation to the film. The example image is from the middle of the roll too, so not something I could have done whilst loading the film.

I'd appreciate some input though to check I'm not being an idiot before complaining; is my view a fair assessment? Is it likely to be just a shoddy processing service?

Another example:

Answer

Dirt scratches would go lengthwise on a horizontal or top-to-bottom on a vertical. It's not likely your camera. The two really bad scratches appear at about the same place -- I'd guess it's to do with something in the lab. Ask them.

Out of curiosity, why film at this point in time?

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How should I use Lightroom for processing for photo lab prints?

Question

I'm a recent Lightroom convert, and I've come to appreciate its built-in workflow for library management and developing. I'm still stymied by printing, however, because I want to use an online lab for printing photos. The most obvious starting point is Lightroom's Print Module; however, that module seems geared exclusively for use with an attached local printer (as of LR3), which does me no good whatsoever.

The stuff I'm specifically interested in includes:

• Use of ICC profiles.
• Cropping to size. I'm somewhat familiar w/ the use of aspect in the Crop tool in the Develop module -- is there a better / easier way? I'd also like to be able to handle "add x inches" for canvas prints.
• Resizing (up and/or down). What are the best practices here?
• Final sharpening and/or any other "before you print" steps.

Searching online yielded a handful of interesting links, though none of these really cover all of my needs:

• AdoramaPix Lightroom Export - seems to just do the uploading part.
• Export to Photoshop for final processing - seems to suggest it's best to do some of these final steps in PS rather than LR. I've got PS-E, so I could probably hack my way through this workflow, but it seems a bit kludgey.
• Using ICC Profiles with AdoramaPix - helpful for the ICC part of my problem.

To be clear, I'm not looking for an Adorama-only solution -- they're just an example. I'd like to understand whether LR is really suitable for this part of my workflow, though, and if so, what should those last steps cover?

Answer

I can't address the full scope of your question, but I can tell you that most labs don't want to know anything about your profiles The point of a profile is to generate a wonky set of differentials that allow imperfect physical displays and print outputs to display an adequate representation of the "true" image values in your image file. If your system is properly profiled, then the data in the file will be the ideal data, and the profile(s) are only used to let you see a best-case approximation of the ideal on your output device. So, if your equipment is properly profiled, the lab doesn't need any additional data beyond the file -- their own equipment will be profiled to render that file properly according to their own equipment's rendering quirks. And you shouldn't need to apply their profile for them (in most cases). The only thing you might have to worry about in colour terms is whether the lab prefers sRGB or Adobe for your application (and sRGB is not only standard but preferred for photographic/chemical printer/processors). Your lab will let you know what they want.

Much the same thing goes for sizing -- they (or their equipment) will know the optimum resolution for the substrate and printing technique, so any image size that's "adequate" will do (you wouldn't want to submit a VGA-sized image for a 30" x 40" print). Don't get hung up on PPI concerns at your end; that's the lab's job. You can certainly downsize an image to save upload time/bit count or upscale an image that's way too small for the desired print size (mostly to satisfy yourself that jaggies and other artifacts won't be introduced), but within reason you can trust the lab to do at least as good a job as you can (often invisibly in the printer system's RIP). Much the same can be said for pre-print sharpening; it's often done automatically for the output device in the RIP process.

The only time you'd want to get directly involved is when dealing with the canvas wrap issue, and I'm not familiar enough with Lightroom to tell you if or how you might be able to add a wrap border. It may be necessary to output to Photoshop.

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