Best place to get prints

[evster]

I'm just wondering where people take their photos to get printed. Whenever I get 4x6's done I just take them to Walmart and get them done for 19 cents, they are good enough quality for her scrapbook. Recently though we got some printed to hang on the wall, even the 4x6's just don't look the greatest and we have a couple shots we want bigger. Has anyone found a place that has good quality printing for larger photos? I know it depends on the resolution of the original image, most of mine are 3264x2448 so even after cropping they should be decent. How big can I go before it will start loosing lots of quality?

[shane]

I never get prints done myself, but a friend of mine gets a lot of prints done and he also gets them done at wal-mart. He has had many 8x10s done there and they look great. He does do a lot of work before printing though, and I don't know what resolution, size, etc.

 

Maybe ask someone at the counter. My buddy says that they are pretty helpful there...at least at the store he goes to.

 

BTW...I love your avatar shot

[Fang]

Hey Evster,

 

I work for Fujifilm and have been in the marketing/technical side of the photo printing buseiness for 20 years. Hopefully my response doesn't come of as a commercial but this is a warm and fuzzy topic for me. I thought about putting this in a PM but maybe others can benefit for high quality digital prints

 

Day in day out printing is fine at grocery, department, drug stores as they are using digital lab equipment and printing on photogrpahic paper. Regardless of other company claims about ink jet or instant print quality, you just can't reproduce the same image quality on a print without using photographic paper like Fujifilm Crystal Archive or Kodak Edge, Endura papers. Ink Jet will produce great prints and in some cases you have to see a photo print side by side to see the difference.

 

The other issue is that most places in the mass retail outlets set there pritners up an automatic, no colour or density corrections. Heck no one takes a perfect shot all the time.

 

Not sure of any pro labs around you - maybe try Essential imaging. If you take the files into a Blacks and indicate you want it colour corrected and adjusted for best quality.

 

If you want the absolute highest quality prints its best to find a pro lab that you can upload to and they'll ship you the prints. PM me if thats an interest

[brandon]

make sure you change them to 300dpi before you print too. This can be done in photoshop in the "resize" column