Introduction
Printing your photographs can be a personally fun and rewarding process.
With personal inkjet photo printers today, one can produce prints that
would once be considered impossible just a few years ago. Given the rate
at which digital cameras sales is growing, the attraction of these fine
printers is even more attractive. Yet, when selling prints is your
business, there are other matters that you'll need to consider, such as
time, cost and print quality. We'll look at each of these as we address
the business factors involved in making prints.
This chapter does not discuss printing methods, techniques, or other
technical information, except when those factors impact your bottom line.
That material is discussed in a plethora of other books. Nevertheless,
selling photography still revolves around the creative process, so
I would never suggest one compromises any part of one's artwork just
to feed the bottom line. However, there are ways to optimize existing
production processes without changing the creative component, and that's
what this chapter is about.
Basic Printing Methods
There are three main ways to make a photographic print: the traditional
darkroom, the home-based inkjet printer, and digital imaging onto
traditional photographic paper.
For those that feel that the older methods of printing with negatives
using chemical baths is the only way to truly make a respectable art
form, I understand. I respect that. I also admire it. If that is your
craft upon which you intend to base your business, don't let me
or anyone else talk you out of it. But, let me be clear: it has to be
your craft and art form. Mastering this art form is a time-consuming
process that often takes years before you're making something truly
unique and different than just making straight prints from your negatives.
If that's you, the business aspects to printing are really only about
whether you're getting the best prices for your materials. The success
of your business is more about how you handle marketing and sales, which
are covered in Selling Photography Prints ().
If all you're doing is making straight prints directly from a negative
without adding additional craftwork (or worse, sending slides or
negatives to a lab to make prints), this is financially the worst thing
you can do, and technically the worst way to make prints. It's costly,
time-consuming, and prone to errors at so many levels, each of which may
occur every time you make a new print. The best thing to do instead is
to scan your film into a digital format, and then reproduce high quality
prints that way. This method is discussed in Editing, sorting, scanning and archiving slides for a photography business, and the
business aspects are discussed later in this chapter.
Printing from digital data sources is part of the process called digital
imaging. This involves factors that include not just making a quality
print, but doing so reliably, consistently, and repeatedly. When you
add the business component, you also incorporate efficiency. The two
main mediums for digital printing are the inkjet, and "photo paper."
Other, less traditional methods include canvas, "Giclee" and Iris prints
(as well as many others), all of which use alternative papers and inks,
which are chosen more for creative license. Here again, it's similar
to that of darkroom printing, where it's more an art form that doesn't
have factors like efficiencies of scale that a more traditional photo
business has. So, let's move onto more typical printing.
Typical Home Printer
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If you're considering a photo business selling prints, you're no doubt
aware of inkjet printers. They are just about everywhere, and many
people have made very nice-looking prints, that may even sell well.
Where home-based inkjet printers really shine is with the higher-end
products and alternative paper types, such as watercolor papers or other
special paper materials. In fact, if you're doing arts-and-crafts
style photography like this, using specialized inkjet printers is a
less expensive option than the higher-end systems listed above. However,
your limitation is more on the longevity of the prints, and their sizes.
For non-art items, such as consumer-based products like note cards,
postcards and greeting cards, inkjet printing has also become a real niche
art form because you can produce things not commonly found in gift shops
or retail outlets. In these cases, it might be most cost-effective to go
to a specialty card-maker to produce these. (For a discussion on this,
see Selling Posters, Postcards and Calendars ().)
For those who are just making traditional prints that go from the digital
media directly onto typical inkjet photo paper, the costs and quality
of these prints vs. photo-paper prints present important considerations.
Inks used in home-based printers are not as archival as manufacturers
claim, and most independent studies show that only the most costly
inks and papers hold their color tone and richness over a period of
a few years if they are kept in a cool, dark place. Even then, their
aesthetic cannot rival photographic paper, which not only looks better,
but has already demonstrated its archival quality over the course of
time. While the dynamic range of inks has shown to be impressive, a
properly color-managed image can yield ever more impressive results
on photo paper. If that weren't enough, business considerations may tilt
the benefits even more towards photo paper too.
On the cost side, inkjet prints can escalate quickly; accounting for paper
and (mostly) ink, the average cost of most home-based prints runs about
$.50 for a 4x6" print, whereas the price for the same print at a
most photo labs goes for about $.30 a print, which brings us to...
Making actual photo-paper prints from your digital images is cheaper
and yields a superior product to inkjet-based prints. At the time of
this writing, Wal-Mart offers them at $.24/print and a Google search finds
many labs selling 4x6's for as little as $.16/print. As with any lab, you
should pay attention to other important features, like turn-around time,
customer service, and photo paper quality, before placing large orders.
The good news is that you can test a lab quickly and inexpensively by
simply making a single print.
The digital photo printers that most corner photo labs and drug stores
use include the Fuji Frontier and the AGFA d-lab series printers.
The main limitation on these printers is size, usually 8x10", 8x12", or
up to 12x18" on some models. Higher-end printers that are used in more
professional photo labs include the Cymbolics Lightjet 5000 (or the
Lightjet 430, which supports bigger paper sizes), and the Lambda.
These systems can produce prints up to 60" wide, and because the paper
is on rolls, of any length. What's more, the dynamic range of the machine
itself yields a broader range of colors on the paper.
Basically, all these systems read digital image data and projects a
combination of red, green and blue lasers that represent each pixel's
color onto traditional photographic paper.
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DyeSub is NOT Photo Paper
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Be careful about the "instant printing" kiosks that allow you to wait
3-5 minutes for your print to come out. These are not photo-based
papers; they are "dye-sublimation" (a.k.a., "dye-sub") printers. While
they used to be considered high-end before modern inkjet technology
evolved, these are not really all that great anymore. Dye-sub printers
(which can also be purchased for the home) have one great feature in
that there are no "dots"—the ink is pressed onto the paper by a kind
of rolling pin that presses each of four separately dyed sheets of
ink. At one time, this was considered high-end technology because of
the smoothness of colors without pixels. Yet, the inks have even more
susceptible to fading that modern inkjet inks, and the "resolution"
of the image is not rendered as finely as inkjet prints anymore.
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The per-print cost of using the high-end, large format printers rivals
those of inkjet prints and even the lower-end printers (although vendors'
prices vary considerably), up to about 8x10". At larger sizes, inkjets
may be cheaper to use on a per-print basis (if you choose low-cost inks),
but whatever savings you may realize is usually offset by the cost of
the printers themselves.
As is usually the case with all my advice: use a search engine to find
a good lab, or query photo newsgroups to hear what others have had to
say about any given lab and the issues in dealing with them. These days,
you do not necessarily need to use a local lab. Most photo labs have
websites where you can upload your photos, and they send you the prints
in the mail. Or, you can just walk to your local drugstore (which is what
I do).
When it comes to any kind of printing, one of the most misunderstood
aspects of this technology is that of DPI, or "dots per inch." While
home-based inkjet printers claim to print at resolutions like 700x1400
dpi, this statement is misleading. They can produce ink droplets
that small, but each droplet does not represent a unique pixel from the
digital image. It just means that the printers can fine-tune the ink
mixture more efficiently on the paper, yielding more accurate color.
Like a cooking recipe, any given color can be made from a certain amount
of cyan, yellow, magenta and black. The finer the mixture, the better the
accuracy of color. But, it has nothing to do with the image resolution
that is printed. Most inkjet printers only require images to be around
200dpi before any lower resolution would degrade quality. In other
words, if you printed an image at 700dpi, and another at 200dpi, you
wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
This is also true of the higher-end digital photo-paper printers. As
discussed in DPI (Dots per Inch) (), every printing device is different in what
its actual "DPI" rating is, but the true differentiator is where the
machine renders not just accurate colors, but smooth enlargements. On some
high-end printers, I've printed very large prints at 92dpi and found the
results to be exceptional. Of course, you don't really want to print at
lower dpi unless you have to. But the point is, you can get better results
from lower-resolution images on higher-end printers because they have
more advanced the imaging technologies. (They should, since these systems
usually cost around $250,000 and take up entire rooms that require strict
temperature controls and chemical balancing.) As a business matter,
selling a 40x60 print to an office complex usually translates to $1100
or more, so knowing how to print at these sizes is worthwhile.
Regardless of how or what you're printing, choosing a printing vendor
is important, but not more than other factors. There is no correlation
between quality and price; if the staff isn't trained well (for color
calibration and dust control), you can get bad prints, regardless of how
much you pay. But the reality is, "bad prints" are more likely going to
be your fault, not the photo labs. The digital printers are often
automatically calibrated often, so if an image comes out unlike you
expected, chances are that your monitor is out of calibration, not the
printer.
For small prints (smaller than 8x10), I go to my local drug store, which
is about two blocks away. For bigger prints that I sell on my website,
I choose labs that let me upload my photos to their site and print by
submitting an order form. I never want to have to leave my house, or
send a disk, or even talk to a customer-service person to place an order.
Assuming the vendor has an automated site for handling my printing needs,
the other main aspects of a good service provider are: turn-around
time and customer service if something goes wrong. You often
won't learn of the latter until there is a problem, so don't just take
statements at face value when things go right.
Summary
The most important aspect to running a photo business that sells prints
is whether you're making a product that's worth the money you're selling
it for. Once you do that, your success in business is then governed by
the choices you make in materials, processes, and vendors. Your job is
to figure out how to make your product without reducing quality, while
managing time (which translates to efficiencies), and costs.
(This chapter does not discuss framing, but the subject is covered in
Selling Photography Prints ().)
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The DPI Fallacy
Your Print Vendor
