Commercial Digital Printing

Hi all,

one of the girls at work liked a few of my autumn pictures.. (I posted a couple earlier in the week) and asked if she could have a copy of 5 different ones for her living room wall.. I've made it.. yay..

After trying out a print or two at work on one of the colour laserjets, while I was out, she eventually ordered a 10x8 print of each from Bonus Print online. They turned up next day and were stunning. Printed on Kodak glossy paper, colours were just right, not too saturated, or too dull, and well.. I'm going through my photos this weekend to sort out some for printing. I've never really got around to it before, and home printing never really did for me.

The price for the above, £1.10 per print and £1.50 postage in lots of stiff card. I thought about the cost, and if I were still using film, that's very cheap considering it would cost more for a roll of film and D&P at 6x4, only to find a couple of really good ones afterwards, if I was lucky.

Once I've received the ones I'm going to get printed, and if they're as good as the others, I'll be putting a link in the recommended suppliers sticky. I'll make sure it wasn't a one off first though.

Basically they really did make me think I had some potential as a photographer after all. :roflmao: I think a quid a print towards an ego boost is definitely worth the money.

Off to take some more now.. some where, haven't made my mind up where yet.

Cheers

Liam

Liam,
For pro-quality prints - www.proamimaging.com
Crazy prices, very quick turn around and absolutely stunning quality. The best thing is they are fully colour managed so you have to prepare the colour space of the file (which you need Photoshop for) but that means there are zero surprises when it comes to colour.
Absolutely top notch stuff
Matt

Hi Matt,

just having a read through the site now. I don't use PS, so I'm just going into google land to see if there's a GIMP plugin to use their profile.. I think. I may have to raed it again????

Cheers

Liam

I'm ordering some samples from this one to see...my homework suggests they use vistek in toronto. They bill the client MY prices and subtract thier fee and send me a check. might be a good option for any Canucks that visit these forums. Will let you know how things pan out (i consider a test to see how well thing pan out over a six month trial)

Liam,
I know there's a "LittleCMS" command line tool that will do colour space conversion. I've tried it with ProAMImaging's profile and the results are just fine.
I'll see if I can dig up a link or two

EDIT: It's "jpegicc" which should be part of the Linux distro. You can edit in AdobeRGB or sRGB and then use jpegicc to map into their profile. Use the "Perceptual" intent and enable black point compensation.

e.g. Assuming sRGB is the input colour space
Matt