Preparing prints for competitions really comes in 2 parts, getting your image printed and mounting the print.
The club is going to try and help with both of these.
The first part is getting photos printed.
Bring your ‘ready to print’ photos on a stick next week (jpeg, tiff, or adobe files) and Iain will be able to show you what they should look like when printed, so you can make any fine tuning adjustments. Iain will then send off a single batch of everyone’s files for printing to save on (share) postage and the prints should all be ready for the following week.
16″ x 12″ prints are £1.10. For images that are particularly short and wide – or tall and thin – you can opt for 18″ x 12″ which are £1.20. There will be a shared postage cost to add which will depend on numbers.
The second part is mounting.
Iain took advantage of a “buy 2 get 1 free” offer to get a couple of extra packs of Daler Rowney mount card, and has some spare sheets you can have at cost (£2.08 per A2 sheet) in charcoal, mid grey and Ivory. Each sheet can be trimmed to get 2 40cm x 50cm sheets, which will mount 1 photo (and at least the back can be re-used).
If this approach is popular, the club will do this on a more organised basis.
More on printing:
Several members already use DS Colourlabs in Stockport, and for photo quality prints, their prices are hard to beat (certainly cheaper than using your own ink jet printer, let alone the cost of a printer to do A3 or even larger prints to make the most of the 40 x 50cm size) while the print quality is consistently good.
One big problem with printing is always the difference between the image on screen and the image on paper. Iain has been working to try and minimise this and can now display a ‘proof’ version of an image that is a very close match to the resultant print from DS Colourlabs.
Iain Malcolm
