Continuing with online printers: this is the last company that I’ll review, and my favorite.  You’ll see why:

Color shifting: Want to avoid it altogether?  Download their color profiles (one per paper/print type). Output your images with that color profile, and what you’ll see, you’ll get.  Take that back: one time their printers were out of calibration.  They re-printed free of charge. Thumbs up, obviously.

Crops: for smaller pics, maybe a pixel.  Larger pics (up to 16×20, in my experience): maybe three pixels. As good as it gets.

Paper quality: all quality papers (Kodak, usually), and you get your choice of finish.  Includes metallics, glossy, others… More thumbs up.

Sharpness: I’ve generally had it hit or miss with them until the most recent print job.  I finally found that they’re considered a “contone print shop”, and you do “contone sharpening”. More about that another day, though.

Overall: AdoramaPix has pretty much earned my loyalty.  Some prices might be higher than with competitors, but the quality is there and they cater to the more advanced amateur & pro alike.

Another continuation.  Yesterday was CostCo, today MPIX.  MPIX, in my opinion, has the best Metallic prints of all companies that I’ve used.  I’m not sure it’s appropriate for all outputs, but it seems to work pretty well.  Sometimes it seems to lack smoothness, though.

So, to jump into it:

Color: So long as you follow instructions, no color shifts. That means uploading images in sRGB.  I messed this up once, and the quality was still good – but doing sRGB made it much, much better.  Big thumbs up here.

Crops: no discernible cropping to the edges.  Maybe a pixel or two, but easily acceptable.  Another big thumb up.

Paper quality: decent heft, Kodak endura.  Some may prefer something else, but it’s acceptable.  Still thumbs up.

Sharpening: Oooh, so close.  Big failure here – they flat-out recommend not sharpening the photos. I have a real problem with this – the output needs to be to my spec, not their automated one. Any sharpening at all, in any way, shape, or form seems to give horrible halos

Overall: I’ve used them for the last two years in a row for my personal holiday cards.  After this year, where I deliberately kept sharpening to a minimum, I may not do it again.  They halos are barely there, but… well, they’re there.

Still, the price is right.  And their metallic prints?  Gorgeous.  By mid-year, I may have changed my mind on these guys!

Continuing on from yesterday’s topic, a review of CostCo’s print service. To keep things fair, I’ll use the same criteria: color skewing, sharpness, paper quality, and cropping. And before I go in to trashing the CostCo online printing, let me state: most people that I know like their service & see nothing wrong with it.  My problems could conceivably be due to my own behavior (which works fine with other print shops), or it could be the location nearest me.

Color: good God, possibly the worst coloring I’ve ever seen.  Take a nice, warm scene with green grass and a smiling, pink baby.  Got it in mind?  Now turn the grass dull (light) grayish green, the skin tones more yellowish, and remove any character from dirt in the pic.  That’s what happened to me.  I’d say that it’s like submitting an AdobeRGB photo when they’re expecting sRGB – only I’ve done that, and it’s no worse.  And other printers don’t skew it so badly.

The color problem appears to be specific to large prints, BTW.  But in this day & age, that’s all I do, so it hurts.

Crops: Again, one heck of a crop that I’ve seen.  One year I used their 5×7″ photos for our holiday cards.  There was “Happy Holidays” in script towards the bottom, and made sure there was plenty of padding between the edges and the letters.

They still chopped into it.

Paper quality: decent.  Kodak, pretty good weight.  Felt like a waste of quality paper after seeing the color shift.

Sharpness: to their credit, they didn’t add any sharpening.  The end results were more or less what I expected.

Overall: I won’t touch their photo service with a ten-foot pole. YMMV.

I recently placed an order of photos, and was fantastically pleased with the results. But more on that another day – today I want to place some thoughts into writing about how I got here.  Permit me, if you will, to walk through my memories…

In my memory, SnapFish was one of the early entrants to online print shops.  They were also the first online company that I used, and for a while my favorite.  Having said that, I haven’t touched them for several years now.  Looking back, I think it has been about six years since I’ve done anything with them (wow, how time flies!).  Five at best.

Why? When I’m looking for a print shop, I’m generally looking for a combination of quality and price.  When in question, I usually go for quality. Qualities like: no arbitrary halos around features, no changing of colors, no cropping into the picture, decent quality of paper.

Personally, I only found them to be so-so.  It may have been my lesser-experienced eye back then, but the colors seemed to have greens and warm tones amplified. This is a common trick for landscapes and portrait/people shots, respectively – and it just bugs me to no end. On the plus side, it does look pretty good for shots straight out of the camera.  On the not-so-good side, if you do your own post processing, then it’s going to look radioactive.

Of course, that was a while ago.  They probably have fixed that by now.

Those halos?  That’s from oversharpening.  I didn’t really see that on prints from them, but I also didn’t really sharpen my own results.  I wouldn’t hold it against them, were I to do another run of prints.

Cropping?  Oh yes, they definitely do – or did.  And not necessarily a small amount, either: I seem to recall losing up to 5 pixels off the end of a smallish 4×6″ print.

Paper?  Decent quality, but felt a bit flimsy compared to other papers. Nothing I’d hold against them, but nothing I’d use for photos of any large size.

So to summarize: I’ve found that SnapFish did pretty good work, but I’ll only ever use them for cheap 4×6″ prints. Something for collages or other disposable uses.