Printing questions

-Do you feel it is less of hassle to make prints and frames from a lab then printing from you home’s printer, when you want to sell those ?

- If you get your prints and frames from a website (like Shutterfly) do you make it shipped to you and then ship it back to your client? as I feel if it’s shipped directly from the website it does not look professional, it would feel more like publicity for Shutterfly than your own business, I feel.... and you cannot add your personal touch, like a printed note or something.

ALWAYS deliver the final product yourself. There's a lot of reasons-

1) Final quality control of the finished product
2) It's really not the customers business where the work was done.
3) Why give the printer free advertising?
4) Avoid awkward situations like them including an invoice with the pictures

Those are really good reasons.

I use a high quality home printer and only outsource the bigger sizes of prints for my own reasons of quality control and always deliver the finished product from me to the customer.

Rob pix4u2 wrote: I use a high quality home printer and only outsource the bigger sizes of prints for my own reasons of quality control and always deliver the finished product from me to the customer.

Can the customer tell if the prints are printer from you or from a lab?

No and I have never had a problem. I enjoy printing myself and have control over papers and cropping where I have sometimes had problems with lab crops on some 11x 14 prints.

This print is an example of my crop where I had a lab cut off the clouds at the top thinking for whatever reason that I didn't want them. I still work from my film archives and that is where I run into lab personel who interpret things like crop marks wrong.

nice photo. Where was that taken?

In Denali national park Alaska, Fuji Reala 100 asa film, Nikon N90s with a 300mm F 4 lens at F22

Wood wrote:

Rob pix4u2 wrote: I use a high quality home printer and only outsource the bigger sizes of prints for my own reasons of quality control and always deliver the finished product from me to the customer.

Can the customer tell if the prints are printer from you or from a lab?

Not if you have a quality printer. In most cases that's what the labs are using. Our local Costco is printing20x30 posters in-store on a wide Epson.

I like C prints and silver gelatin prints, so I order my prints from the lab. When I shot film I didn't like dropping it off at the lab, because I preferred the control my darkroom gave me. Now my monitors are calibrated to the lab's printers. I process the photo as I like, upload it, order it without corrections, and it's shipped to me or the client. It's like having a RA-4 machine of my own, except the printer cables are 200 miles long.

Someday I would like to learn ink jet printing, but at this point I don't have the time or money, and I'm very happy with the prints from my lab. I finally got my darkroom closed down, cleaned up, and reclaimed for family use. I'm happy to let someone else mess with the machines for a while.

Many labs offer to remove their logo and advertising from orders. I do like to see the order before it is delivered to the client, but after thousands of orders and tens of thousands of prints from my lab without problems I have confidence in them. If the buyer/client is local, I'll have it shipped to me, and deliver in person. If they are out of town I usually ship straight from the lab to avoid double shipping charges.

Henry Peach wrote: I like C prints and silver gelatin prints, so I order my prints from the lab. When I shot film I didn't like dropping it off at the lab, because I preferred the control my darkroom gave me. Now my monitors are calibrated to the lab's printers. I process the photo as I like, upload it, order it without corrections, and it's shipped to me or the client. It's like having a RA-4 machine of my own, except the printer cables are 200 miles long.

Someday I would like to learn ink jet printing, but at this point I don't have the time or money, and I'm very happy with the prints from my lab. I finally got my darkroom closed down, cleaned up, and reclaimed for family use. I'm happy to let someone else mess with the machines for a while.

Many labs offer to remove their logo and advertising from orders. I do like to see the order before it is delivered to the client, but after thousands of orders and tens of thousands of prints from my lab without problems I have confidence in them. If the buyer/client is local, I'll have it shipped to me, and deliver in person. If they are out of town I usually ship straight from the lab to avoid double shipping charges.

Have to agree with you on having trust with your lab, and if they are happy to take there logos and advertising off as mine do then why not have it shipped to your client direct.
I do a minimal amount of printing myself on an Epson PX700W max print size is A4.