Printing your digital photos

A few years ago, in 2003, I purchased an Epson Stylus Photo 2200, capable of 13×19” prints, to print my slide scans and the pictures from my first digicam (a Canon S400). I spent a lot of time figuring how to use Photoshop and trying to match the monitor output to the prints. I got a hardware monitor calibration puck, wasted a lot of ink, and tried different papers. It was a great learning experience, but at the end of the day it was just too much work to print a bunch of 4×6” photos, and only worth it for large prints.

There were also quality issues; the Epson 2200 had problems with glossy prints in the light areas (‘bronzing’), something which could be minimized with different papers but not totally eliminated. Then there was the paper itself, many times not as nice and heavy as the regular prints you would get with film processing.

If I had such a hard-time getting decent results with my digital prints, what would the casual user do? Print the occasional photo with their desktop printer and not care much of the usually dismal output? Or just be lazy and keep all the pictures around in the computer, with a high probability of being lost forever after a hard-drive crash?

I then discovered that the local Costco would print your digital files on these huge Noritsu printers onto Fuji Crystal Archive, the same photographic paper I loved from the film days. The prints were affordable, you could get free printer profiles from Dry Creek Photo, and you could get them with white borders too (which is my preference). So the digital print dilemma was solved.

Or was it? After several years of printing at Costco I have gotten a bit disappointed. My computer setup is quite nice, with a Eizo ColorEdge CE210W monitor that is calibrated from the factory and has a super easy calibration procedure. I manage my pictures with Photoshop and understand the basics of a color managed workflow. I do output sharpening before sending the pictures to print (something that everybody should do, otherwise they look soft). Yet my photos from Costco are a hit and miss thing. Colors sometimes do not match, and other times I think the printers are doing automatic corrections, even though the operators tell me they do not. A common theme is that the prints tend to be too dark.

So I decided to try a few online print services to see how they stack-up. This will be the subject of my next posts.