Online photo printing review – part 3

The finalists: SmugMug, Snapfish, and Adorama Pix

Last month I got the prints from the photo printing sites reviewed and I liked both the ones from Snapfish and SmugMug, which lead me to do a final round between those two.
Remember that SmugMug transitioned papers from Fuji to Kodak and my second batch from Snapfish was not as good as the first one.

I have received the prints, but also got to talk to the reps from Adorama Pix and they want me to try again (which I did) using their operator-based manual color correction option.

I used the excellent plugin BorderFX for Aperture to generate the 4×6” pictures at 300 dpi, using a sharpness setting of 0.4 and several white border settings (the thickest I tried was 50 which was adequate, 55 would have been better).

Results

The prints from Snapfish came very fast, they were sent and processed on a Wednesday and arrived two days later (on Friday). Great turn around. The ones from Smugmug, issued on the same day as the ones from Snapfish, took two days to get processed and an additional week to arrive.

Snapfish:

This last batch from Snapfish were pretty decent this time; the sharpness settings from the plugin were good, and color-wise there was a tendency for the yellows to have more luminance than they should, but the effect was pleasant. Interestingly the shadows on people’s faces were lifted (brighter) yet the overall black level of the pictures was great.

Smugmug:

The prints from Smugmug were printed on Kodak paper, and I didn’t like how thin the paper feels. This is not the Royal Gold Kodak paper that Adorama Pix uses, which has a very nice weight to it. The colors matched the color profile preview on the computer (which is good to see how colors are going to shift) and my previous comments still stand: accurate colors yet the blacks are muddy, giving a low contrast to the pictures. The prints from Snapfish, although not as accurate, popped nicely due to very good blacks. The one I did print on Lustre (Kodak Endura) did have a very nice contrast compared to the glossy version, and was sharper. The paper has a proper weight too, so even though a bit more expensive (21 cents vs. 19 cents), I think it is the way to go.

Smugmug update:

I decided to go ahead and print 50 pictures using Smugmug’s lustre paper and the results are fantastic. The depth and saturation are great, and the color shifts (some de-saturatation on the oranges and reds) match the profile perfectly, making great previews of what you are going to get before printing.

AdoramaPix:

I did receive the first batch of pictures from AdoramaPix, which were glossy with color corrections done by them. The results are much better than the first time where I selected no color corrections; they are pleasing although maybe lacking a bit of contrast.  The second batch in the order was with Lustre paper and that one didn’t get processed, probably because of an exception.

Final Conclusions

The best so far is Smugmug’s lustre prints – excellent, accurate, colors; consistent and with good color profiles. This is the best solution if you want to have control over the whole printing process. If you don’t have a Smugmug account for online pictures (annual fee) you could go through their printing lab directly, which is EzPrints.
(Personal benefit section: if you want to join Smugmug, you could use my referral and save yourself $5 on the first year – just use the coupon code: 8gdwavv5aQlxA  - I will get a credit too) 

Conversely, I do not recommend Smugmug’s glossy prints -  they feel cheap (thin paper) and look flat.

AdoramaPix should be ideal if you want somebody to fine-tune the colors of your pictures (select ‘color-correction’).  I do think that their glossy print lack a bit of contrast though (maybe better with lustre?).

You might be happy with Snapfish - you are not going to get the most accurate colors, there might be variability (sometimes too much), but they are very cheap and the prints have a good dynamic range.