Photo Labs |
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The comments below are unedited opinions of the colleagues who submitted them. A date (month and year) indicates that the comments following that date are from the given month and year. The most recent comments appear at the bottom.
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1/99 ***Use a pro lab like ColorTek, which will make a medium format interne and print from that. The interne should cost something over $15, and a custom print (ask for custom printing) costs about $35. Additional prints are much less expensive when ordered at the same time.
| For some images, I prefer cibachrome processing over internegs to print from color positives. However, cibas are hard to get, because they use particularly toxic chemicals. Internegs also offer the advantage that you end up with a negative you can reuse. I think FerranteDege still does cibas, but I would rank FD last among the prolab recommendations you may get. In fact, I wouldn't even group FD with the prolabs. The staff at FD talk a lot but don't really know enough to support advanced needs. By the way, the more directions you can give to the printer, the better. Be clear about what you care most about in the image (faces? whiteness of the whites? trueness of the sky? foreground or background?...) If you have a color guide, that can help a great deal. You can take the slide to Staples and have them make a color copy from it to get a better look at how the image appears on paper and to use as a talking aid in discussing your wants with the staff at the lab. In any case, don't hesitate to ask the lab to reprint an image. That's what you're paying for. SBI is a good photo lab, but I haven't been all that impressed by their custom printing from slides. Spectrum (4260222?) used to be the best for color printing, but they lost a large part of their very talented staff some years ago, and I don't know how Spectrum's current work stacks up. I'd be interested in other people's experiences there. ColorTek is at Kendall Square (8686606), Newbury St., South Station, South Boston and some other places. | |||||||||||||||