Print sites?

What's a good dependable site to have prints made?

After much frustration, I give up on trying to print my own

Why the frustration?

If your colours aren't accurate, sending a digital file to a print service may give you slight improvement at best - unless they do colour correction for you.

If this is the case, then you're probably no better off than with print film, as the operators are likely to make arbitrary colour judgements, with little understanding of how colours should look underwater.

It could prove to be hit and miss!

More of a frustration with the equipment than the process

Don't have as much free time anymore, so I'd like to send them out. If something looks exceptional to me & is slightly off, I'll take the time to make a good print myself.

Any suggestions on places to do this?

I'm not an expert at this, but I've used Pictopia on Eric's advice. They are very good. I've also used Shutterfly. The two services are different and I'd use them both again depending on what I was after. I also use a local service when I want the prints foam-backed.

I don't use a photo printer at home because I don't print often enough to justify it. With a service like Pictopia, they assume the risk of botched prints. Even though they are costly, you have to print a fair amount to make up for the cost and trouble of owning your own printer. With Pictopia you get a nice print reliably and the can ship it to you overnight. Be sure to batch your prints up so that shipping doesn't eat you alive.

Pictopia offers an accurate color profile for home-proofing on your color-calibrated monitor. I have never been surprised when receiving a print -- it always looks as I expected it to look. I use my home inkjet for prints I give away to friends, but I always use Pictopia if I am selling a print. You should probably figure out whether it's your image that is the problem, or if it is your color workflow with your home printer. Properly calibrated, your home setup shouldn't give you any more surprises than a third-party printer would.

Many underwater photographers are using them now, and most of the Hawaii pro-contingent uses them for all of their print fulfillment. Too bad I didn't get a cut after recommending the service! (I'm joking).

See the following link for my recommendations and links to these recommendations.

http://www.splashdowndivers.com/photo_gall...lternatives.htm

Hey, guys -- I just got a batch of 24 prints back from Pictopia for a show I'm having on the Galapagos next month, and all of them really did exceed my expectations. They were printed from the 1Ds, and are really much better than prints from the D60.

I'm so used to seeing my photos on my little notebook screen. There is really nothing like seeing a large print, though.

I'll third/fourth the recommendations of Pictopia. I've been very happy with their service and the quality of the prints I have had made there.

Out of curiosity, what size and quality (and for what image size) did you all order at Pictopia ?

I've got a couple of 11x17's sitting in my office that Pictopia printed, and they are indistiguishable from traditional enlargements.

But, better than that, I think I can honestly say they are better than Cibachromes I have had made in the past.

The originals were 35mm slides, which I scanned on my Dimage III, corrected in Photoshop, soft-proofed on my calibrated monitor using the ICC profile supplied by Pictopia, and then uploaded by FTP to my account. The files are about 25/26 MB each. I reckon James's 12 MB S2 files, if well exposed, would probably enlarge to the same size and quality quite well, due to the absence of grain in the dSLR files.

I use Costco for printing give-away stuff in Hawaii. They use a Noritsu printer and the ICC profiles are available at www.drycreekphoto.com. My frustration is that I do not know how to properly compensate for the effects of the profile(particularly the white paper). I would appreciate a hint or two in this matter. When I select white paper I watch the whole thing dim and darken and playing with the contrast, brightness, etc doesn't seem to bring it back to what it was. Any hints or tips on this one? Thanks!

--John

I do not know how to properly compensate for the effects of the profile(particularly the white paper).

John, I think you may be labouring under a misapprehension of the role/benefit of the ICC profile. The profile allows photoshop to display the image with a reasonable emulation of the final colours you will see from the printer. You will inevitably lose a bit of brightness, have contrast changes etc etc as you go from the transmissive, directly lit environment of a computer monitor to the reflective lighting involved in viewing a print. The profile is allowing photoshop to illustrate this effect on your monitor.

White, for instance, on a monitor is actually all the phosphors glowing together. The key word there is glowing. Paper white is the base colour of the paper, there is no internal source of light to make it bright... and to make matters worse, the light has to penetrate the layer of emulsion on the print surface, hit the white paper background, reflect off, go back through the emulsion layer, then finally the white coloured light can be viewed. Each of these steps involves losses, and the end result is that white looks less bright and "pure" on a print than it will on a monitor.

Look at some prints that you have had made, and compare them to the same image on your monitor using the ICC profile to soft proof. You'll probably find that they are very similar, which is the point of using the profile in the first place. There is nothing you can do with photoshop adjustments of brightness/contrast etc that will overcome the inherent limits of brightness, white point etc in the Noritsu printer.

Hello,

I use Wallmart for the prints and I think they do a great job (probably not pro level but you can't get a better price).

I saw that one of you mentioned about the collor profile of the printer at Cosco. Does anibody knows what printer Wallmart uses and where I can get the collor profile ... Not that I had bad collor experiences with them but I did had one shot that I would have liked to be lighter.

Thank you

Vlad

Vlad,

Check at Dry Creek Photo's database page. The profiles they use are location-specific, so go look for the Walmart you used. I live in NJ and did see at least one Walmart listed, so there's a decent chance you might be able to find something.

Tom

Thank you Tom

Found my Wallmart in Raleigh NC and I was using exactly the one it is on that page.

I am going to start using their collor profiles.

Vlad

in the UK ... I have now used www.photobox.c.cuk and they have a really good quality of print ... although they are a little (tiny) bit darker than I see on my screen.

They do a very quick, very cheap good job of it all.

Highly Recomended

I have to agree with Giles - photobox are also awesome on the service front.

Files uploaded by midday more than often are on your doormat with the first post the following day! - marvellous !

If you bulk buy your print credits you can get 6x4's for about 12p cannot say fairer than that. Also they give you a generous amount of storage plus an unlimited temp folder so you can load thousands of images for print if you should so desire.

That URL again

http://www.photobox.co.uk

and NO although it probably sounds like it I don't work for them !