Why Printing Through Your Photographer’s Professional Lab Is so Important

Instead of preaching how important it was for all of my clients to print their beautiful photographs with me through the services I offered via my awesome pro lab, I figured why not go ahead and *show* them why. We all love a good visual, right? 🙂
Here are prints from several different highly recognized companies that offer prints vs. one of my professional labs. The final edit of the photos is also included to offer as a point of reference.

{This is important because not all print labs are created equal! When you consider what really goes into creating an image, from paper choice, to ink, and the type of printer itself, there are a few variables that can really change the final result!}

Note* The only issue I ran into here was that I tried several scanners and they weren’t doing the photos justice. I had to simply lay them out and use my camera to take a photo of the prints. The result was not that pleasing because it is hard to prove that my pro lab prints do actually represent the image file 100%, and they truly do when you’re holding them up in your hand!

The low-light situation I had to shoot in resulted in my pro lab shots looking very dark…but nonetheless, I don’t have anything to hide and wanted to at least compare/contrast the different printing options that are available to us. Something that you can take easy notice to is comparing the color tone, highlights and shadows of each image.

My personal takeaway –

My professional lab produces the closest print to my computer’s image file. They also offer lustre coating to the paper which provides a light sheen to the image. It also makes it more resistant to fingerprints and has the most gentle detail, kind of like fairy dust 🙂 The prints do have a higher contrast to them than I’d prefer, but honestly, only by a fraction which my perfectionist eye would see. My lab uses Fujfilm Professional Paper. The tone of each image matches the chosen colors I worked with in Photoshop and I didn’t even have to do any crazy calibration to my screen to achieve this connectivity. We are just a perfect fit!

Walgreens took it upon themselves to warm up every image so the tone was definitely not on point. Same goes for the brightness which was increased. These two pointers may not bother the regular consumer as its at least going in the right direction. I’d prefer that over a more cool/dark image for sure! The prints unfortunately arrived somewhat bent, with a slight crease running through the bottom half of every image I received. Their paper choice (Kodak) was not my least favorite, but certainly not something I would choose for a top pick.

Shutterfly had what seems to be my least favorite prints. The colors were wonky in comparison to the pro lab prints/true image file and truly do not offer us the greatest example of what the image was meant to be. Fuji Color Crystal Archive is the paper of choice for this company and was somewhat similar to the Kodak paper by Walgreens but with a teeny bit more gloss to it. Truly ever so slightly different in that respect, but as I’m not a fan of glossy, it is going further from what I would personally desire as an end result.

Snapfish definitely has their printers calibrated differently, and similar to Walgreens, warmed up all the images. But, holy hell, by a LOT. I mean, if you just take a look at photo 1 below, it looks like my beautiful mama & papa had intense spray tans 5 minutes before taking the shot lol! I could rate the Walgreens method of warming an image up to Snapfish being on a scale from 1-10… Walgreens = 3 | Snapfish = 8. They also print with Fuji Color Crystal Archive paper so I can’t say much more on that, but something that irked me was that one of the images wasn’t cut properly. It may be hard to notice from this snapshot, but if you take notice to Photo 2, the right side of the image had a strange white/grey border hanging off of it.

All in all, I always suggest printing through your photographer but if you need to visit a lab on your own time, check out mpix.com

They will offer the same great quality as one of my professional lab’s would but they have this available specifically for consumer level customers. You will always receive prints that are the correct size, color and texture. If you only want the best of the best when it comes to preserving your memories, please think first before running to a drug store. The price difference is not even that radically different when you choose a website such as mpix! I know we all love that 🙂

My bottom line truly is this { you get what you pay for } If you choose to hire a photographer for not only their skills on the day of the session, but for their style in post processing, I would think that it would be just as important to ensure that the integrity of the photog’s vision remains intact when you purchase prints/albums/canvases etc!

With love,

Brooke

Photo 1.