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November 30, 2006
[ BIG, BIGGER, BIGGEST ]
TIMES ARE TOUGH for the specialist photo-lab shops. Film sales are down. Developing and printing of films is a dying business. Camera sales are being depressed by competition from electrical goods retailers.
Some of the more enterprising operators of D and P shops are fighting back by offering new services that involve a high degree of customisation.
Extra large custom prints made on wide format inkjet printers is one on-site service that the smaller operators can profitably offer. Where formerly the usual way of getting a poster print, 50cm by 75cm, was to send off a negative to an outside processor to make a silver halide print, these days the print is made from a digital file on site using inkjet technology.
The wide format printers take paper in rolls which means the width of the print is limited but the length can be just about anything up to the standard length of the paper. The limiting factor is the amount of information in the digital image file.
Andy Wu, manager of the Kodak Express shop in the Forest Hill shopping centre, has installed a wide format Epson printer that uses paper in 60cm wide rolls. He can make prints up to 3m long, provided that source image file is good enough.
As a rough guide a 6 megapixel TIF or JPEG is needed to produce a 40cm by 60cm print. Beyond that size it takes 8 megapixels for 50 by 75 and 10mp for 60 by 90. There is some flexibility in this formula and it is possible to make acceptable prints from files with fewer pixels if the overall quality of the image is good with perfect exposure, focus and colour.
Andy Wu charges $70 for a 60 by 90cm print made on paper with a pearl finish that he calls matte.
He also offers a print-on-canvas service on the Epson printer that produces prints that look like paintings. The canvas print is stretched on a frame so that it likes like the genuine Rembrandt. This service is more expensive than the paper print -- around $125 for a 40cm by 50cm mounted piece ready for framing. Imaging thinks they look a bit chintzy but a professional photographer pal says: “Mothers love ‘em!”
If you prefer the traditional silver halide print there are places that still produce them. Nuprints has a service for amateur photographers that will produce poster prints from digital files. A 50cm by 75cm print on photographic paper costs $35.
Customers can deliver picture files on CD to the plant in Braeside or do the whole business by post.
For prints of this size the lab needs JPG or TIF files with a resolution of 300dpi and already prepared to the output size of 6000 by 9000 pixels. Images can be enlarged in Photoshop using the program’s scaling or by using programs such as Fred Miranda’s Stair Interpolation plug-in or Genuine Fractals.
Preparing the image with correct colour, brightness and contrast is the responsibility of the customer and it is possible that what you see on your monitor is not what Nuprints will reproduce because of different colour profiles on the two devices. Nuprints will provide a profile for use in Photoshop on request to help match your monitor with their printer.
Think big!
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Posted by terry at November 30, 2006 10:52 PM
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