Any Internet photo printing services that can deal with Camera RAW?

by philg

Out here with my cousins in the Bay Area the question of how to print some of those Thanksgiving photos arises.  Are there any Internet printing services that let you upload camera RAW format images and print from those?  That would be the best quality, presumably.  Please add any recommendations of good printing services for high-res files in the comments section.  Thanks!

17 thoughts on “Any Internet photo printing services that can deal with Camera RAW?”

  1. Speaking for myself only, I’d much rather make decisions about white balance, noise reduction, dynamic range and sharpening than let somebody else do it so I wouldn’t want to submit camera RAW files.

    According to most places, a JPEG at the maximum quality setting is just fine for most print sizes. If you’re really concerned about it, submit a TIFF for the larger prints.

  2. I’m not aware of any. Few even accept TIFF files. I’m using a Nikon D70 and use Nikon Capture 4 to batch the RAW files to high-quality JPEGs (min compression), and upload these. Photoshop with the right Camera Raw updates can read a host of RAW formats and you can set up a macro to convert the images. So far this is the best solution I’ve been able to find. I was hoping to use ImageMagick to do same, but ran into a dead end with support for the various RAW formats.

  3. Along similar lines, if anybody can suggest an online vendor to print some digital wedding photos, I’d sure appreciate it. They were taken with a Mark II. Looking for something a little higher quality than the mass market online printers, but no more than 2-4X the cost. Just looking for some 5X7 and 8X10s.

    Thanks,
    Gregory

  4. I agree with Wayne’s comment above… Sending a RAW file gives no insurance that it will actually be what you want it to look like. You’ve got to at least do a TIF or high quality JPEG conversion yourself (and, if possible, move it into a color space that you think their printer will use…)

  5. Chuck,

    You brought up another point that I forgot to mention. Ideally, you would find a printing service that has profiled their printers and makes that profile available so that you can convert your images to that profile. Dry Creek Photo (http://drycreekphoto.com/) has done this for quite a few printers, including most Costcos.

  6. Philip, it’s not exactly next door from Oakland, but Calypso in Santa Clara is a well known lab in this area. When I lived nearby, I used them frequently to process negs and slides, both 35mm and large format, and their work was impeccable. I never used their digital services however. You can find them on the web (surprise!) at http://www.calypsoinc.om/

    If you find yourself going to the Santa Cruz area, try Bay Photo, http://www.bayphoto.com/

    I don’t know if either lab will take RAW files, but they will deal with TIFF. If you don’t have the tools with you to convert them, email me, I can help.

    -jav

  7. I spoke to a couple of “pro” places that would take just about anything but, wow, the cost was staggering. The close place charged a $5 processing fee per image, plus $5 if over 2 megabyte, and another $10 if over 5 megabytes. Then “pro” printing fees on top of that, of course.

    They shut down, building sold, so I don’t even have that anymore.

    What *I* need is a reasonable place to turn jpgs into 35 mm transparencies (slides). Send them the images and my CC # and get the slides in the mail. Even better, how about a machine to do this? Camera body on one end, high res (2k x 3k?) RGB video in the other, when done with a roll bring to the local E6 shop. How about $2k not including the camera body?

    Peter

  8. I think the real problem is consumers have been trained to accept lower quality goods for the sake of convience. For instance, the popularity of pay for download MP3’s when clearly CD’s are better, and records are even better still. Similarly, digital photo companies have declared JPGs are ‘good enough’, and we’ve accepted it.

  9. For good quality prints I think that a properly colour corrected JPEG outweighs the benefits of a lossless format.

    What would be great is a RAW format that allowed you to “edit” (ie: embed the settings in the file, to be reproduced by the printer) a couple of settings: crop, white balance, levels, curves and sharpening. (the latter for several image sizes)

    That way you could have it all: a resonably compact file printed just the way you want it.

  10. Philip,

    I’m puzzled — why would you need that?

    If you shoot raw, that’s normally to get more control over the exposure range. So do you expect the lab guys to be good enough to do that for you?

    I have to admit I don’t quite get the point.

  12. Jan: Of course I expect the lab guys to be better than I am! I’m not a digital imaging expert. I don’t have a monitor calibrated to whatever printer they are using. I don’t print photos all day every day. Maybe the best would be to sit with the lab guys and consider some alternatives for a particular image. I’m just back from a trip to visit Peter Menzel, one of the truly great photographers, and he would take a trip down to Pictopia to work with their technicians on large prints (saw some truly amazing 6×4′ images from the old Canon EOS-1Ds 12 MP camera).

  13. Phil: ok, I think I see what you’re trying to do here. My experience has been that folks at “digital” labs do not necessarily know what they’re doing. Also, I have found that the art of managing digital color hasn’t yet arrived to digital photography. It seems that the publishing world is much more advanced. Every time I asked for color profiles for the Fuji Frontier my lab was using for digital prints, I got blank stares (“well, it will look like on your monitor…”).

    So, when I shoot RAW, I process it to 8bits myself.

    BTW: I sincerely believe that folks who buy a Digital Rebel to shoot JPEGs are wasting their money.

  15. I don’t know about printing RAW files, but I’ve been meaning to give WHCC a shot. They come highly recommended, and apparently make a good effort to have a calibrated workflow.

  16. Eric,

    I believe WHCC requires all files to be JPEG format and in sRGB color space with sRGB profile embedded. As long as you have a profiled monitor, this should produce excellent results.

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