ProPhotos by Brian Photography

Following the rapid take-up of digital cameras and digital photography, home, consumer in-store and online digital photo printing services have become widely available. I hope this blog entry will explain how to get the best out of these services, and how to avoid some common problems.

High-street photographic shops, and on-line retailers now offer digital photo-printing services. They take your digital images in any common format (JPG, BMP, TIF etc) on CD or various memory-cards, or web-uploads, then print them onto traditional photographic paper in the familiar 6×4″, 7×5″ etc. sizes. Compared to home ink-jet prints, prints made on true photographic paper tend to look much ‘richer’, and are vastly more durable with regard to handling by sweaty fingers, humid environments, and fading in daylight. Although argueably more convenient, once you take into account the cost of speciality papers and inks, home inkjet printing usually works out much more expensive.

Industrial digital photographic printing equipment, which you will find in specialist photographic labs and behind the counter in high-street stores, are designed to produce thousands of high quality prints per hour at relatively low cost. The machines use conventional colour photographic printing paper, but instead of exposing it through a negative, they use digital exposure systems. The Fuji Frontier uses a scanning laser system, as does the Noritsu, while the Kodak/Kis machines use an LCD-based exposure system somewhat akin to those used in digital office projectors. Either way, after exposure the paper is processed in the traditional way using wet chemicals to develop and fix the image, then washed and dried. Incidentally, prints can also be made from old-style film-negatives (and even slides) using an integrated high-speed negative scanner.

Be aware that as well as true photographic prints, many shops and malls feature stand-alone kiosks offering while-you-wait prints which you collect from a slot in the front of the kiosk. There is often no minimum-order, but these machines use a thermal printer technology which is inferior to proper photographic prints, and usually works out more expensive.

It may seem trivial, but people often have problems with heads or feet being cut off on the print, even though they are present in the digital image provided. This is frequently caused by the aspect ratio of the print being different from that of the image file. While 35mm film has a 3:2 aspect ratio which perfectly matches a 6×4″ print, compact digital cameras commonly take 4:3 ratio pictures which are much squarer. Doris and I capture all images in the standard 3:2 / 35mm ratio as this is the path that Canon has decided to take with their Pro Digital Cameras (DSLR).

 4:3 ratio digital image

    6×4″ print crop

    7 x 5″ print crop

Cropping caused by print aspect ratio (shape) mis-match to original image.

By default most consumer printing services enlarge the image so that the paper is filled. If cropping is a regular problem then the easiest solution is to choose a print-size which better matches the shape of the pictures your camera takes (for 4:3 ratio images, 7×5″ prints are a reasonable match). Otherwise you can usually ask for pictures to be printed with borders (choose black or white bars at top/bottom or left/right) so you see the whole picture.   Finally, even if you do supply an image in exactly the correct ratio (eg 3000×2000 pixels for a 6×4″ print), the resulting print typically still does not show the extreme edges of your digital file. This is because the consumer has been conditioned to expect prints which “bleed” off the very edge of the paper. To allow some mechanical alignment tolerance and avoid thin black or white bands at the edge of the print, the image is actually scaled to between 1% and 5% larger than the physical paper for printing (meaning there’s typically around 1/8th inch or 3mm of image missing off the edges of the print).  I hope this helps in understanding today’s digital world of photography printing.