Digital Prints

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Mastering Digital Printing
Some image-editing software programs such as Adobe Photoshop Elements even have
plug-ins to simplify the image-uploading process.
One result of all this online activity is that the physical locations of both the providers and
the customers is becoming irrelevant. Where before labs were receiving and sending shipments
by walk-in or air courier, they now receive uploaded files to their website and only
need to return the finished prints the traditional way.
Image Sharing and Printing
If there’s one thing that makes print-service providers nervous—besides the tidal wave of
people doing their own printing—it’s photo or image sharing. This is the process of
uploading images to one of the free hosting services so they can be stored, organized,
viewed, and shared. You can assign a password to your “albums,” and only those you give
the password to can see your images. This has become a popular way to avoid the time
and trouble of e-mailing pictures and images to family, friends, and other contacts.
But, that’s not all. Since most people still like to have a real print in their hands, companies
like Shutterfly, Kodak’s Ofoto, EZ Prints, and dotPhoto not only offer image sharing
but also print ordering. Once you’ve added images to your personal album, you can
“enhance” them (crop, rotate, add borders and effects), instruct the service which image
to print and in what size, and the prints arrive a few days later. Shutterfly even has online
resolution guidelines to tell you if your images are too low-res to print well on their Fuji
Frontier printers (see Figure 10.8).
For Pros Only
One popular development
for professional photographers
is the online image
viewing, ordering, and printing
solution. For example,
Fujifilm’s StudioMaster PRO
is an image presentation and
ordering software package
that lets professional photographers
build a customer
order that goes directly to a
Fuji Pictrography or
Frontier-equipped lab. The
software is provided by the
lab (sometimes for a fee), and
it allows for color-managed,
onscreen image-editing, slide
shows, and albums.
Figure 10.8 Shutterfly’s initial printordering
screen (top) and the actual
prints after they arrived in the
author’s mailbox.
Courtesy of Shutterfly
www.shutterfly.com