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A Photographer’s Guide to Printing Photos

15 Aug 2024
Categories: family

Unless you’re new around here, you know how much I LOVE printed photos – as loose prints, framed or in albums. But I also know that there are plenty of providers online and it’s hard to know which one to choose.

All my family photography galleries come with a print credit. That credit can be used in a shop that is attached to your online gallery and gives you the option to buy a variety of print products to make sure your photos don’t just live on your devices or the cloud.

The credit covers at least a couple of small prints – depending on your package, your credit is higher or lower and can be applied to bigger items from the shop. But you also receive a personal print license with every image you purchase from your gallery (my 3 collections come with a different number of digital files included) which means you can print those photos at any lab you like.

I understand that my professional labs that supply products in my gallery shop are not in everyone’s budget and to me, it’s more important THAT you print your photos than having them printed through me.

So let’s imagine you went for my middle package, The Storyteller, which comes with 20 high-res files along with a £100 print credit. You can spend those £100 however you wish and take the 20 high-res files to any other lab to print.

But which lab is the best? Or the most affordable? Or the most convenient?

I did a test with 5 labs along with my professional lab to give you an overview of how I rate them. The labs I tested are My Fujifilm, Saal Digital, Snapfish, Photobox and Boots instant printer. No two labs printed the same and each had different things I liked and didn’t like.

A few notes before we dive in…

All images were printed in 5×7” because that’s a nice medium-sized format I personally like ordering for myself. However, all my images are in a 3:2 which technically asks for a 7.5×5” print. Consumer labs don’t always give this option so I had to choose the crop on each order to decide where my photos would be cut to fit the 5×7” paper. This is important if your print size does not match the original photo format.

A very typical print size is 8×10” which is a lot more square than 3:2. So when printing, always pay attention to how your image gets cropped! Most labs tell you when images are cropped and ask you to confirm the automatic setting.

With all labs, I unticked the option to colour-correct the photos before printing because all my photos are edited to be print-ready. Using the colour optimisation for any lab can cause a different result so please bear that in mind.

It proves quite hard to photograph edited images to look true to colour so not all photos below may show “accurate” colours as they are in real life. The photos look different from every lab and in isolation, most of them are pretty good – but once you compare them to each other, differences become more obvious.

So let’s get into it…

Photo lab comparison

My Fujifilm

I had never used this lab, despite being a huge Fujifilm fan (in terms of cameras). It’s been recommended to me – I had high hopes for this one just based on the name.

The ordering process was relatively straightforward. When picking your images and the sizes, you can choose between glossy and matt which are the standard options. I don’t like glossy photos so chose matt.

On checkout, the website asks you to create an account. This comes down to personal preference and I wish I hadn’t had to do that but it’s not a big deal. If you plan on ordering with them again it’s actually convenient because it means you don’t have to fill in all your address and payment details again in the future. The time between ordering and delivery was only 3 days so it’s a very quick process which is awesome for the need of a quick turnaround.

When I got the order, I noticed that the paper felt very nice. However, the black and white images have a slight blue tint and the colour photos are a bit too magenta in comparison to other labs.

The cost per image was £0.35, the delivery was £3.99. In total, I paid £7.49 which seems to be around the average across the labs I tested.

Snapfish

I found this lab just through a Google search and randomly picked it because it ranked well online. I hadn’t used them before and had no expectations.

As a big online lab, they run promos and at the time of using the service, they offered me 20 free 6×4” photos when I created an account with Snapfish. I haven’t made use of the offer but it’s handy if you want to print lots of images small on a small budget. The lab creates an account automatically on order which means whether you take them up on their offer right away or not, you will have this special deal with 20 additional free images no matter what, for as long as they run this promo.

During the ordering process, I could again choose between a matt or glossy finish – I chose matt.

When I got the prints, which like My Fujifilm took only 3 days from ordering to delivery, I noticed that the paper itself was a bit smaller than all the other labs. The measurement was a bit off from 5×7”.

The black and white images had a slightly cooler tone and a subtle blue tint, just like My Fujifilm. My black and white images have absolutely no colour left in them, so any colour tint is a lab issue and does not come from the edits.

The tone, contrast and saturation