[ Postcard from Caledonia ]

I’ve recently been entering some of my work to the league competitions at my local camera club and I’ve been encouraged by the results and feedback. Whilst digital images are fairly easy in terms of preparation (basically resize it to an agreed screen resolution and set sRGB as the profile), the printed image is something completely different and is an area where I wanted to step up my game.

Printed photographs entered for such competitions are typically mounted on 20 inch by 16 inch card. That is quite a large workspace to fill and if, like me, you only have an A4 capable printer, it’s not ideal. Added to that the choice of doing a “proper” job on mounting using traditional framed matting on the board or a simple spray mount job.

For my first couple of competitions I had went down the spray mount route and put a digital border on the images to at least give a “mounted” effect. Whilst the images did quite well, I still think they could have been presented better, by being properly mounted, and most importantly, larger on the mount. Basically my A4 printer wasn’t going to cut the mustard.

More after the break….

God Gave Epson (roll printers) To you

Having taken a few opinions, the next step up for me printer-wise, would be the Epson 2400 - I do a lot of Black and White work and this one is supposed to be an absolute cracker. However at £420+ I’d rather put the money towards a D300 to replace my Nikon D200 first.

So I decided to go down the outsourcing route and get my prints done via an external printing lab. I have three prints to enter into our annual competition and thought that an image size of 16″ x 12″ would sit well in the 20″ by 16″ mounts required by the competition rules. So that was my target output.

Man on the Silver Mounting

Next thing to consider was mounts. You can cut matting boards youself, but I was never a keen fan of DIY, so I had a dig around on Ebay and found a supplier of ready cut mounts and matting board (they can also supply nice poly bags to slip them in if you ever fancy selling you prints). The supplier could do a 20″ x 16″ mount with a 16″ x 12″ cut-out - add on a 20″ x 16″ backing board and you have the perfect profesionally finished mount. Total cost £1.50 for cut mount and backing board - add 20p if you want the matching poly bag - Bargain. This supplier can also do cut-outs to any size free of charge for larger quantities.

So what about printing. Well I’d used Photobox.co.uk in the past, and had been reasonably happy. However I was intruiged by a recent magazine review sent to me by our club competition secretary - this article was featured in the September 2007 issue of Digital Photo magazine. They compared the services of consumer friendly Photobox.co.uk with suppliers who normally market themselves to the professional photographer. Surprisingly all represented pretty similar “value for money” but the “pro” services had higher quality results.

Two out of Three Ain’t Bad

The three pro services featured in the review were:-

• Loxley Colour
• One Vision Imaging
• Peak Imaging

Of the three I immediately discounted Peak Imaging (which actually got the Gold award in the article) as they only supported Windows users. Whilst I could use Windows on my iMac using Boot Camp, VMWare Fusion or Parallels, I wouldn’t use it as a principle - more Mac support from suppliers please!

So I registered with both One Vision and Loxley. This is where consumer-friendly sites like Photobox win - both One Vision and Loxley rely on a pre-registration process where they need to supply you with an account number manually, before you can place an order. At 8pm on a Sunday evening that could be a problem for the first time user of their service.

Added to that One Vision also need you to call them with your credit card details so that they can keep them on file to match against any orders that come through. Loxley meanwhile can support just entering the card details at the time of order.

Having looked at both suppliers I was attracted initially to One Vision as they offer a “metallic” print option amongst their list of digital print services, something that Loxley didn’t at first glance appear to provide (I’ve since found out that they do. Loxley also offered a 20% discount off the first order placed with them. So which supplier to use?In the end I went for the metallic option via One Vision and will keep my 20% offer up my sleeve to use with Loxley for a Wedding album I need to put together in the next week or so. The “Digital Photo” magazine article that I referred to earlier also had One Vision with higher score than Loxley in terms of quality.

Heavy Metal Thunder

Metallic printing is a special process which really adds a “wow” factor to any monochrome or highly saturated image. I was first turned on to this process having seen the work of Peter Lik in a gallery in Hawaii - his images were so vibrant, they almost looked backlit. I thought this process would really help with the contrast of the image featured at the top of this article - where I needed to really show off the texture and detail of the image of the old door.

On cost, a 16″ x 12″ standard print from One Vision comes in at £6.87 (£5.85 plus VAT) per print - the metallic prints come in at £14.10 (£12 plus VAT) each so are a bit pricier. In the end I ordered 4 different images on both standard and metallic print. Turnaround is 2 days and I’ll let you know the results once I have them in my hands.

From a price comparison point of view, Photobox.co.uk offers 16″ x 12″ “poster” prints for £5.99 (VAT inclusive) and Loxley Colour come in at £6.05 (£5.15 plus VAT) for the same sized print. So they are both a little less expensive than One Vision - quality may come at a price!

A Whole Lotta ROES’y

So it was now down to preparing my images and uploading them to the online print services. Both One Vision and Loxley use a downloadable piece of software called ROES (Remote Order Entry System) - this is a Java-based application that is tailored by the supplier to match the specific service offerings they provide. This is where things get interesting as suddenly your printing output options are opened up to some items not normally sold through consumer channels. Anyone who like me has been roped into do a wedding for a friend will welcome the professional album options and the ease of layout the ROES software provides.

In terms of usage the ROES software took a little time to understand - it’s not the most user friendly software it has to be said, but after a few minutes poking around I quickly sussed out how to select my print options and upload my images.

Once your order is placed you receive an email acknowledgement confirming the order has been successfully placed. And fortunately confirming any options you selected. At time of order you also have the opportunity to add any special handling instructions that are required. You can also elect for them to professionally colour-correct your outputted image, or to have no colour correction.

But does it go to 11?

All-in-all I’m impressed so far. The proof will be in the outputted image however.

So I’m almost ready for the competition - hopefully professionally printed images on professional mounts. Will it make any difference to my chances? Probably none at all, but at least I’ll feel happier that it’s only the images that will let me down, not the presentation.

Good luck to me!

P.S. Bonus points for naming all the rock bands referenced in this article

Update: The prints arrived - whilst the metallic finish works well on highly saturated images, I felt it added a colour cast to my black and white images. Therefore I’ll be sticking to standard lustre prints going forward - I may revisit the metallic options for some colour images in future, but not for monochrome work.