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hi all, could do with some help, im doing a little portrait work for friends and family and will have a wedding soon also.. Where would you recomend i get my photos printed?
Jessops are the high street shop that do prints quite cheap but are they up there for quality? whats the 'sell by date' on their prints, how long before light etc effects them?
Is there a place that pros use to get prints done?
any advice would be grateful.. thanks
stu..
Ashlley Collour Imagiing
50 Ashley Road, Parkstone, Poole, Dorset. BH14 9BN
Tel: 01202 742508
photoprint@ashleycolour.co.uk
This one does very good prints and are pretty good prices.
Ant
If your looking for any big size prints, why not try one of the members on here , pmorgan, his printing site can be found advertised on the side of the main page or Here.
I have to say that I have never understood why any serious photographer would ever consider using a commercial "photo lab" for printing.
I accept that a decent home printer is going to cost £500 and that the costs of decent inks and paper are not insignificant but, to take hours over the taking of the photographs and then trust your finishing work to an assembly line, just seems a wee bit silly.
With your own printer you have total control over the results and, if one does not immediately please, you can make the tiny adjustments that will square the circle.
With any photo lab that I have ever know, it is definitely a case of regression towards the mean. Which may be OK for 90% of your work but not for the other 10%.
Quote: The title of the forum suggests a little divine interception might help!!!
Oh Gooddd, I missed that one, Definitely slipping up. 
Giclée prints far outlast anything from a photolab. We did some studio signage with laminated RA4 prints and it all faded within a couple of months. We replaced with giclée and they're still perfect 5 years later.
If you really need "Godd" prints, remember that nothing can match the quality of the almighty!
Weddings may be OK with mass produced prints and their archive quality should be OK I think. But portraits surely require very delicate adjustments in post processing and also printing?
Printing hundreds of wedding shots at home would be a bind, but hand crafted portraits would benefit from individual attention in my view. Even cheap A4 printers will do a good job once setup. But I guess you really need an A3+ printer for prints for displaying on a wall.
A cheapie A4 printer will indeed do the job but they often have very small ink cartridges which makes for very high running costs. Much better to use a Continuous Ink System loaded with a good archival ink. Check out Fotospeed.
some very good companies quoted above. The ones the pros use you need to register with (some lengthy details; maybe they hate amateur photographers). But if you're looking for "cheap and cheerful" (we're not all rich) then PhotoBox (are cheaper via Boots.com) are a reasonable price for fairly good quality. Don't use Snapfish (especially for someone else's prints) unless you can afford to pay a little more and re-print elsewhere afterwards. I'd had free re-prints from them when doing investigations for a print lab of choice.
I use a home printer for a small run or one-offs, because although buying online is cheaper per unit you have to factor in p&p. I'm not running a business.
If you don't already have a printer then that has to be factored in, to justify the outlay i.e. how many prints will you do in its lifetime... compared to the price of using a lab.
You'll find many labs using the same paper anyway.
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