Getting your Exhibition Photo printed at a commercial service

The next big decision to make when Exhibiting your photo(s), is where to get them printed. I’m going tp assume you haven’t got a lot of experience print your own photo and intend to use a local commercial service. If you don’t get prints made regularly I strongly suggest to get some trial prints made first, probably on 4 by 6” size, which you should get for around 15c each (or less). You can take a picture of a colour swatch or artist colour wheel (or download the one here)and get that printed as well, this will help compare your screen colours & contrast to your test print(s).

Most places that offer photo printing can handle either SD cards of USB keys, and it is better to just have the images you want printed on them so as to avoid having to sort through many and run the risk of accidentally printing the wrong photos (and then blame the store!). Some store (eg Teds, Harvey Norman, Snapfish & Kmart) let you upload photo on-line with in-stores pickups if you set up a free account with their service.

I’ve researched the likely price of common photo processing, at place like Office Works (which don’t always get goodreviews), Big W, KMART, Snapfish, Ted’s, Harvey Norman on standard glossy or matte papers (in the Melbourne area). Printing at “professional labs” and on specialist paper will definitely cost more., especially if those labs mainly carter for wedding photographers.

Size	~cm	Price
8x10"	20x25	$2-4
8x12"	20x30	$4-7
A4	21x29	$5-10
11x14"	28x35	$12-15
A3	29x42	(?)
12x16"	30x40cm	$15-$20

You can see the price skyrockets as the prints get larger. Further getting non-standard sizes can also significantly increase the price. It is often better to get a larger size printed and leave white margins (and remember to tick don’t expand to fill), then use the matte to cover the margin.

Colour matching is a very complex process but if you stick with the sRGB colour space you should be fine. This is normally the default for your camera and most photo editing software (but it can be changed by presets in the software you use, so check) and don’t tick boxes like “lets us enhance your image”.

So set sRGB and post process/refine your image before you take it to the printers and you should be pleased with the result.

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Prints can be Excellent Archives as well

I have come to accumulate a lot of very early family photographs and they are still in reasonable condition (some aren’t more on that in another post). The biggest challenge is figuring out who is who (picasa face recognition is helping but it does a fair bit of grouping parents with their children and mixing siblings etc) and getting things organized, and working out safe storage. Not such hard task but time is required. However I have begun to imagine what a horrendous task this might be for future generations that might suddenly find themselves with a few million digital photos many in camera specific RAW format, spread across a number of the by then outdated USB external drives or in a massive zipped conglomerations plucked from a social media web service just before it shut down. The solution to ensuring a future of family photo legacy is simple, just make prints of your favourite photos. Print those important family photos now!

This brings me to how to get those prints of all your social media post (the ones you really want) onto prints (or photobooks). A couple of years ago that could have been expensive but several services are gearing up to make that more affordable. Services like Big W, Harvey Norman and Ted’s camera have kiosks that will let to log into a number of popular social sites, like facebook and instagram. On-line service like shutterfly and snapfish (there are plenty of others) offer some compatibility to pull out images from your social photostreams. However often these will probably have been resized to suit fast web display and might not be able to be printed much larger than 10 by 15 cm (4 by 6”).

Whilst I do have my own ink jet printers (yes I have a few including a decent older HP photosmart with 12 ink colours but now I’m having difficulty getting the ink cartridges) I usually get prints made from an on-line service such as snapfish. The reality is they are cheaper by the time you consider the ink and paper costs (and less frustration) up to about the A4 size. Current prices of the better deals should be around 15 cents for a 10 by 15cm up to just over $5 for an A4. Many services still offer the 10” by 8” inch size as the largest mass processing option at around the $5 mark. These are the size ranges that will suit most family legacy collections anyway.

I notice that snapfish are heavily advertising unlimited 6 cent prints at the moment on TV and this is a great deal to start you family legacy project. If you miss this deal just keep your eye out for other similar offers, many services offer 50 to 100 prints free when you sign up. This lead me to look at printing from flickr (which I have done previously to snapfish on many occasions but the links from your photostream now go to the more expensive wall art and photo book services offered by flirkr itself. However creating prints is still there in the organizr tool under the print and create tab. You need to scroll past the wall art and photo book option and then you will find other options, including prints. In Australia the only non flickr photo services come from snapfish.