Printing digital photos

[garyk/nm]

Hi Y'all!
My daughter just returned from a school trip to Italy where she took ~800 digital photos. She now has them all downloaded to her hard drive for review/ weeding/ editing.
The question: how best to get the good'uns into print form? In what media should they be stored for carrying to the processor for printing: CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, wipe the SD cards clean and upload the goodies back to them?
Thanks for any advice. I know we have several pros and some very talented amateurs in residence here.

[Paddy]

Well, I'm neither a pro nor a talented amateur, but I just load them onto the computer, cut, crop/edit as desired, burn a cd and take it to Walgreen's.  They have a do it yourself machine that's easy to use. Boom; next day I have prints.

[RGO]

I really like the online services of Shutterfly (http://www.shutterfly.com/) or Kodak (http://www.kodakgallery.com).  Both make high-quality prints and will give you some free prints if you want to try them out.  Just upload, select your options, and in a few days they'll arrive in your mailbox.

[Bogie]

And if you want anything larger, I can run 'em up to 44" x whatever...
 
$5 sq. ft. for THR/APS folks on some nice heavy photo paper.

(BTW, you can find some folks online printing for $4 sq. ft. - they're using 4 color solvent printers and lower grade non-archival quality paper. I'm running a nice 250 gr paper and an 8 color pigment printer.)

[garyk/nm]

RileyMc, any old CD? Are some better than others? How many pics on 1 CD?
RGO, good info, but I'd like to have more local control. We have a deadline and don't want to risk mail being late/ misplaced.
Bogie, we'll definitely keep you in mind. Out of ~800 there is sure to be one special one worthy of your magic.

[Bogie]

CD or DVD for storage. Make at least two, because they get scratched, frisbeed, whatever... Redundancy is your friend, and so is redundancy...
 
DO NOT DOWNSIZE OR COMPRESS IMAGES. Yeah, it's tempting to make all 800 shots fit on a 128 meg memory stick, and it can be done, but you sacrifice quality. What if later you want to blow something up? CDs and DVDs are cheap storage. Shoot the largest pixel count your system can deal with. If you can shoot raw format, use that. Otherwise tiff, or uncompressed jpeg.

With the Nikon I used to use, if I shot raw format, a CD would only hold 60 or so shots, but it was worth it.
 
If you don't have a CD writer, they've got 'em cheap at Wally World.
 

[Brad Johnson]

If you want simple 4x6 prints, get all the pics edited and setup like you want, then dump them to a CD or DVD.  Go to your local Wally World, Walgreens, or CVS.  They will have a digital kiosk in the store where you can load the prints into their system.  I get mine locally for 19 cents each.  I sure can't print them myself for that - not with paper, ink and such - and get the same quality.

Brad

[Harold Tuttle]

set up a free account at www.walmart.com
upload your selects
print them to any walmart for one hour pickup

http://photos.walmart.com/howitworks

12 cents for 4x6s

[garyk/nm]

Harold, great idea! Thank you.

[Brad Johnson]

The online accounts are great for a few shots, but if you need to load several hundred it will take forever (literally hours, because you have to select and upload each individual pic).  In that case it's a lot faster to dump them onto some kind of media and carry them in.

Also be careful about Wal-Mart's prints.  Our local stores (all of them) seem to have some kind of aversion to keeping their print systems calibrated.  Pick ten or fifteen of the most sharp and colorful and send them as test prints.

Also, it's amazing how your monitor calibration can throw off your pics.  At the very least use something like Adobe Gamma or some other basic calibrator.  It will ensue that the prints you get back will actually look like the pics you see on your computer screen.

Brad

[lupinus]

have her burn them to a CD or she can go to walgreens.com and upload them, select a store, and pick them up in as little as an hour.  I was a photo tech there for a year before moving to distribution, that is the best way to be honest.

Whatever you do, do not go from them at home printer whammer jammers.  And even more so just the photo paper inside of a printer.

Photo machines are big for a reason, theres a whole big chemical process going on inside.  Paper gets exposed to certian light, then is developed through a chemical process.  Not a drop of ink involved.  The at home printers use ink, thats why the picture quality is generaly inferior.  It's also why so many customers asked me why their photos were fading.  Also it's not cheaper.  At any walgreens more then 50 digital prints will be 19 cents a piece with the coupon thats in the sale flyer just about every week.  If you go through walgreens.com, the prints are 19 cents a piece reguardless of how many you do.

[mtnbkr]

Also be careful about Wal-Mart's prints.  Our local stores (all of them) seem to have some kind of aversion to keeping their print systems calibrated.  Pick ten or fifteen of the most sharp and colorful and send them as test prints.

Repeated for truth.  Don't pay for digital prints at Wal-Mart until after you've viewed them.  More than once I've left the prints on the counter and walked out.  That said, there have been many times where they've done a fantastic job.  Just be wary.

Chris

[Bogie]

Lupinus, my "home printer" prints will outlast... me.

Of course, this wasn't one of the things that they give you freebie with your new $500 confuser, in hopes that you'll buy $25 in carts by the truckload...

Lightfastness Ratings

    * Epson UltraChrome K3 Ink
    * Color: Up to 108 years²
    * B&W: Over 200 years²

²Ink lightfastness rating based on accelerated testing of prints on specialty media, displayed indoors, under glass. Actual print stability will vary according to media, printed image, display conditions, light intensity, humidity, and atmospheric conditions. Epson does not guarantee longevity of prints. For maximum print life, display all prints under glass or lamination or properly store them.
Visit www.wilhelm-research.com for the latest information

[Monkeyleg]

In the "good old days," white in a photograph was white when printed, grey was grey when printed, and black was black.

If you take your photographs at all seriously, you need to match the color profile of the imaging software you're using (Photoshop or whatever) to the printer you're outputting from.

Admittedly, I rarely do photographs at family functions, or have prints made at Walgreens. For all I know there's a color setting in your camera called "Walgreens."

But the color profile and settings must match the printer settings. Otherwise, you wind up with something that doesn't look anything like you saw when you did the photograph.

[Bogie]

That's probably also why I've got a coupla grand invested in RIP software...

If I can't get an ICC for my printer and a paper, I don't use it.
 

[Monkeyleg]

Bogie, I just miss the days when I'd give a sheet of film to separator and say, "match this."

Now I have to look at the shadow density and highlight density, as well as the overall density of the photo. It's hard to use monitors as a guide, so I have to use curves and histograms. It's like asking the chef at your favorite restaurant to describe your meal based upon its molecules.

What I wouldn't give for the old days.

[Harold Tuttle]

If I want a color profile ring cycle I can use dry creeks profiles for the local Noritsus

For 40 prints from the brownie snow tubing trip,
an un touched image from my canon rebel looks fine from Walmart.


Drycreek is a neat concept, heres my local calibrations:

Frederick:

Costco #330:  10 East Walser Dr., Frederick, MD 21704   Phone: 301-644-1488
Store info: Noritsu  model 3111, Fuji Crystal Archive Paper.
Glossy paper profile, March 21, 2007
Lustre paper profile, March 21, 2007
Mac OS 9 format version (both profiles). See usage note.
Note: This printer uses our enhanced accuracy custom profiles.
This lab has multiple printers. Request your profiled prints be run on Noritsu 3111-A.
Gaithersburg:

Costco #213:  880 Russell Ave.,  Gaithersburg, MD  20879   Phone: 301-556-1969
Store info: Noritsu model 3111, Fuji Crystal Archive Paper.
Glossy paper profile, March 28, 2007
Lustre paper profile, March 28, 2007
Mac OS 9 format version (both profiles). See usage note.
Note: This printer uses our enhanced accuracy custom profiles.
This lab has multiple printers. Request your profiled prints be run on Noritsu 3111 QSS-B.


http://www.drycreekphoto.com/

We offer a database of freely available Icc printer profiles for digital labs world wide.  These include Fuji Frontier, Noritsu, Agfa D-Lab, LightJet, Durst, and Chromira printers among others.

You can use these profiles to get the best color fidelity from your digital prints.

View the database.
How to use printer profiles for your own images.
Labs marked as using enhanced accuracy profiles use our highest accuracy profiles. The targets were generally submitted by the labs themselves. Labs without this designation used our basic profiling service (no longer available), and the targets were submitted by various photographers.

[Bogie]

I'm guessing that by now a lot of the camera manufacturers have gotten their working spaces somewhat aligned, which will make it easier for the snapshot labs.
 
Be nice if they just all aimed for adobe rgb tho...
 
Then again, most folks don't have calibrated monitors either... This probably means most of you. At this point, the phrase "close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and small tactical nuclear weapons" comes into play.
 
Ask the machine jockey at your local walgreen's if he/she/it knows the color space that they're using, and if they can tell you, then assign that on your end when you look at 'em in photochop. Not all that likely to happen, but hey...
 

[Ron]

hen again, most folks don't have calibrated monitors either..

It is so frustrating editing photos then printing them out to find they don't look like your editing job!!

I went out and bought a doohickey called Spyder2express by ColorVision.

It hangs over your monitor and checks the color as it scrolls through reference screens. It then loads the corrected color settings into your system.

Overall I am happy with the results, my photos print out pretty close to how they look on the screen, not 100% but pretty darn close. The colors are still a little different but at least the exposures seem to be nearly the same.

I don't know how important this is but I opted to buy a Canon printer and use Canon paper because I use a Canon EOS Rebel XTI camera. I am trying to eliminate variables when making the translation from the 'puter to paper.

Without upgrading to serious equipment I think I have reached the ceiling in equipment capabilities. My photography and digital editing skills are now the biggest obstacle to getting the results I'm looking for. 

[Gewehr98]

My "big" printer (nowhere close to the size of Bogie's) is a Tektronix Phaser 780 color laser, capable of using letter, legal, or tabloid size stock (11" x 17").  It uses the standard Pantone color correction, as well as a bunch of different types lumped under "TekColor Correction". I know that using it in conjunction with the Adobe CS2 or CS3 color correction software, it's pretty darned close to WYSIWYG. I understand the Phaser 780 did this to match its output with the bigger offset color printers, making it a pre-production or proofing printer. This is an older professional color laser, so I'm sure newer versions out there have even better tools to keep colors accurate to the original.

I see in my last Cyberguys catalog, they're offering that Datacolor Spyder color calibrator for $217.00.  The greens in my Hitachi 42" plasma are a bit too vivid, so I would like to balance it with something other than just my calibrated Mk1 eyeballs. 

Ron, have you tried your toy with the TV set? 

[Ron]

Ron, have you tried your toy with the TV set?

I have the stripped down version and the supporting materials didn't mention anything about calibrating TV's. I'll have to poke around in the set up section and see if it is even available with my version.

Somewhere I did read that the hardware that comes with the pro versions is the same as the express version,  so there is probably a possibility of upgrading to that capability.

Question, is there something I can do to change or modify my printers settings to even more closely match what I see on the screen? I see where I have some ability to change the printer profile under the color management tab in "set printer properties".

[Bogie]

If you've got the spyder setup where you can output an ICC, then just plug it into your windoze sys32 drivers folder (I think - I look at the info when I need to look at the info...).
 
Personally, I don't worry about my monitors, because I don't edit stuff for people.