Photo sharing services and print quality (or, SmugMug is bad ass)

Raoul just posted some observations regarding the quality of prints that he received when ordering via Flickr. It appears that Flickr allows you to order directly from them and have your photos delivered, or send your order to a local Target for pick-up. And it comes as little surprise that Target prints are of a lower quality than those generated by Flickr’s print shop.

In and of itself, this isn’t an observation worth repeating. What interests (and amazes) me is that this type of disparity is commonplace among online photo sharing services. So many, it seems, give so little consideration to the quality of the prints that they and their printing partners produce.

Online photo sharing has changed the way that we share and evaluate images. We no longer tote portfolios full of prints from party to office to gallery for all to see and admire. We capture our images, process and upload them. And this digital product is all that the vast majority will ever see. Still, many photographers (or even regular consumers of photographic products) still refuse to pass judgment on the quality of a photo until they see it in print. It’s a good feeling to view a photo on the computer and know that the composition, lighting and focus appear just as intended. It’s another feeling entirely to see that same photo in print, matted and framed. That’s when it’s “done.”

Unfortunately, my experience with many photo sharing services is that they consider their auto-adjusted and resized copy of your image to be The Product. And, quite simply, it is not. There is still a demand for high-quality printed images (even if only a small percentage of total hosted images are ordered as prints). And photo sharing services would be wise to take great care in determining how they want to serve those who fuel this demand.

Of all of the photo sharing services that I’ve tried–and I’ve tried no less than a half-dozen for meaningful periods of time–only one stands above the rest in terms of the consideration that it gives to the ordering and processing of printed images: SmugMug.

Before buying in to SmugMug, I uploaded a (very carefully exposed) sample image to a handful of image hosting services and ordered the same type of print (5×7 matte, no border) from each. The image in question had a dark green background, with some red and yellow in the foreground. It was a perfect test image, in that any shop that applied generic adjustments to every single image or simply blind-printed was sure to underexpose the background and murder the vibrant colors in the foreground.

And sure enough, Snapfish blew the entire image (a terrible auto-crop, underexposed), as did Shutterfly (underexposed and dull) and Ritz Camera (also underexposed). SmugMug’s was the only lab that got it dead on, either by taking a look at the photo before or after printing, or by intelligently applying adjustments based on the properties of the image.

If you’re interested in some really, really outstanding prints, you should sign up for a fourteen-day SmugMug trial, peruse their documentation on common printing problems (which doubles as a excellent primer on color space, resolution, and other common properties of digital images) upload some images and order a few prints. They’re not the cheapest print shop, and you have to pay a nominal yearly fee if you choose to keep the service, but their’s is truly a photographer’s service, start to finish.

Will SmugMug get it right 100% of the time? No. But do the SmugMug team and print shop work harder than any place that I’ve found to make the printing process as painless and accurate as possible? I think so.

UPDATE1: Almost forgot to link to the details of SmugMug’s print services shootout, which explains the process by which they chose EZPrints as their lab of choice.

UPDATE2: If you do decide to sign up, please submit my referral code: oFbEjYRp4kqzE. It’ll save both of us a few bucks.