Commercial printing, large size

I am looking to get some A3 enlargements done of my mono and colour work.
Has anyone got any recommendations for mail order companies that they have had good results from, please.

cheers, Lilly

Lilly,
For up to 18x12" I would always use Pro AM Imaging - www.proamimaging.com

You do have to fully prepare the image (upsize to correct pixels and apply a colour space transformation) but the price is stupidly low (£1 for an 18x12) and the quality is absolutely top drawer - I mean razor, razor sharp.

Anything bigger than that and I'm not too sure, except that I have a Photo Artistry 36x24" canvas hanging in my office which is awesome too http://www.photoartistry.co.uk/
(They do large format as well).

HTH!
Matt

Oh Wow, that is cheap, I was quoted £14.99 at my local shop for A3 and it wd take a week!
Will def try Pro Am out, thanks, will keep you posted.

Thanks. Matt
Lilly

Matt, one more small wee thing if you can help me on, by going Pro Am I see I really do have to get my LCD screen properly calibrated, I know I am slow in this but keep putting it off, scares me!
Anyway, I will do it now and I see Pro Am reccommend Spyders, I see the Express is £65 & Suite is £125, double the price.

The only difference being Suite gives you:
Advanced features – including RGB pre-calibration function, multiple gamma and colour temperature options
&
ColourVision PrintFIX PLUS software

Is it worth paying double the price for these extra feature as I really do not understand what they actually do.

Lilly, thanks...

Lilly,
If you have a single monitor then it's very unlikely you'll need the Pro version

The non-Pro used to be licensed for a single PC (think it's now 5), whereas the Pro could be used office-wide (which is what we do here - one Pro version can calibrate the whole building and allow matching of different displays to look the same).

EDIT: The Spyder-Pro version can also be used to calibrate projectors as well

To be honest, any of the decent USB calibration tools will be 100x better than nothing! A friend of mine has the Pantone Huey and that seems ok too. The place to ask and find out is Colour Confidence - http://shop.colourconfidence.com/

And you're right... you definitely need a calibrated display prior to going with ProAM. Once you can trust your display the prints will be exactly what you ordered

Matt

The proimaging service sounds great.

When developing JPEGs (from RAWs) from Silkypix for it, should they be in sRGB or AdobeRGB? I can't find the answer on their website.

I've seen the info on the colour profile - but all Silkypix can do with it is change the display option (which I will do).

Any tips on sharpening? How much more, relatively, needs to be applied compared to making images for viewing on a monitor? I know that's a "can of worms" question but any rough guidance at all may be helpful.

(I don't have Photoshop)

Cheers,

I second Proamimaging, superb sevice.

To be honest I've never applied a different sharpening for print and web and I've always been happy with the printed results from Proam. Matt will probably be able to advise better than I though.

Pro Am have a Forum of their own, and I did notice this thread there...
http://forum.proamimaging.com/viewtopic.php?t=2129

Big can of worms being opened....

First, you need Photoshop to do the colour mapping into the ProAM colour space. (Actually there is a command line tool that can do it - I'll dig out the forum thread where I described it )
EDIT: HERE
and HERE Look for "jpegicc" (NOTE: Geek alert )

IF (and that's IF) you have a full colour managed workflow, you should output in AdobeRGB from Silkypix. If colour management gives you the willies, then stick to sRGB and use the command line tool

Regarding sharpening - the general advice is to:
* Upsize to the correct pixel amount (e.g. 4020 pixels for a 10" side)
* View at 50% in Photoshop
* Apply some modest unsharp mask until you can just see the halos.

Viewing at 50% gives a fair approximation of the print quality. For more detailed stuff read the copious documentation on www.thelightsrightstudio.com (once you get past all the annoying flash stuff!)

Matt

Thanks for that, Lil. I've posted a question there about Silkypix.

The £1 a print offer is going to be very tempting!

Matt, Thanks, but I don't have Photoshop and I'm not going to be getting a copy any time soon due to the cost.

I'm gonna have to just use Silkypix plus any free software I can download.

Re-read my post There's the "jpegicc" command available from the LittleCMS package - which is Open Source - which can manipulate the colour space from sRGB or AdobeRGB into any other (including the ProAM space).

Additionally The Gimp v2 apparently supports colour profiles... but I haven't tried it
Matt

OK, thanks again Matt. I will try and calm down and do some reading! Perhaps I'll save it untill this evening.

I just got a 54x36cm (A2) print of one of my other half's landscape shots on matt fuji photographic paper. Absolutely amazing quality for £10 + P&P (£2.99 I think) with next day delivery from Photobox.