incident while trying to print pics at store

[WRM]

Hello all,
I do amateur photography and work on my photos in Photoshop 7. I recently took some pics at one of my brother's baseball games, and made a collage. I gave my mother the picture on a cd so she could get it printed at her local Wal-Mart. When she got there and tried to print it, she was refused, on the grounds that the picture was "professional". (The collage had no watermarks or copyright on it). They also turned down some more pics, including one that all I had done was turn it into a grayscale pic. The employees were very rude, and even a manager came over and insinuated that she had stole this pic and he could lose his license if he printed it.
Now, although I am somewhat complimented by their reactions (still new to this), in reality, I like getting pictures printed at Wal-mart, and I like to send pictures to family and friends to allow them to get what they want printed. So what would you do? Has anybody ever had an experience similar to this? I can't imagine what would have happened if I had taken my own pictures up there and they had turned me down!
Thanks,
Ross

[Noelf]

It sounds like your mother ran into some overzealous workers. Someone from above probably put the "fear of god" into these poor guys about copyright, and they took it to an extreme.

I would tell her to just look in the phone book for a film shop that does digital printing also, they are more likely to understand the process better than Walmart seems too.

- Noel

[Vikki]

I know exactly what your mother experienced. They are actually ridiculous about this.
What you'll have to do is enclose with the CD, a photo release (one for each photo) that includes your phone number. They will actually call you.
I think you can download a "release" at their web site.
I would also send them an email describing your experience.

You are almost better off going to a local lab, where they can get to know you.

Interesting story though, a portrait photographer I know, was at the service department counter at a local big chain grocery store. Right next to the counter was their Kodak print kiosk. While the photographer was waiting at the counter, a woman came over to the kiosk and proceeded to copy a portrait the photographer had taken. Talk about a coincidence!! The photographer was naturally upset and talked to the management regarding their policy, or rather, lack of it.

[rondon]

I've never had a photo printed outside of my inkjet... at Walmart is the printing done on good machines ?

A Lab sounds a bit formal.... while walking up to a machine sounds interesting...

Walmart ... or anyplace pretty much ties up a day from here so could anyone tell me briefly how to prepare ?

I'm supposing that the machine must handle about any format given that they cater to the public... but are there limits to file size etc.

I've looked at the online Walmart site but it seems to pertain to uploading photos for them to print... nothing about a kiosk to print ourselves.

Can you walk up to a machine with a disk and print pix ?or have I read this forum wrong ?

Thanx

[Vikki]

It depends.
Some Walmarts have 1 hour printing. There you will find an Aladdin (think so) koisk where you can put in your media and place your order. It transfers the order and images over to the main printer, which is a Fuji Frontier. It actually only takes about 15 minutes, but they say an hour in case of backlogs. Fuji's don't use embedded profiles, and work best with an sRGB profile.

At all the stores, you can get prints right away, but I'm not sure what printer they use for that, and it may only be 4x6's.

The online ordering is nice in that you can spend all the time you want preparing your order. They will deliver the order to you, for a small shipping charge, or you can have your order sent to the nearest Walmart store, with no shipping charges.

[rondon]

Thank you... sounds good.. i registered and will check that out soon...
RonDon

[cedwar]

Hi everyone...

I just wanted to let you know that I deal with this topic almost everyday, being that I manage a One Hour photo lab. I am strict on the copyright policy because there is an overwhelming number of people who do want to copy work that has been professionally done. I prefer to protect those photographers, especially the smaller more private ones, who try to make a living at that profession. Now when someone comes in with a collage, or something that looks professionally done, who might have done it themselves, I ask them to produce the negatives as proof that the original image belongs to them.

If it turns away business, Id rather err on the side of caution than infringe on a professional's work.

Cedwar

[westsidemaurice]

If you visit Walmart you know you'll waste an hour...and sooner or later you'll have dents and people problems in the parking lot. How much is your time worth, and do you really want to patronize a slave owner?

The smallest HP printer does better work than Walmart and costs almost nothing. The Epson 2200 does better work than most custom labs and still costs less than a scratch or dent in the Walmart lot.

[rondon]

I dunno how bad things are there in NM ...dents and problems in the parking lot .... I guess people are a little touchy there. Never had either problem.
But then I'm so glad to get to town I have to sit on my hands to keep from waving at everybody. might be my attitude.

an hour at walmart isn't much in my life...

But what led you to say the printers are no better ? is that true everyone ?

I had the opinion they utilized high end printers... That was my interest... I don't do enough printing to justify buying a good one.

as for the slave thing.... sadly we're entering a new age... industries have gone global... with little remorse.

What's to be feared now is a falling dollar. let that slide far enough and that "slave" may be able to buy more with his money than we can with our's.

[chris h]

Walmart have taken over a big food chain in the UK called Asda (Associated Dairies) and their staff are called 'Associates' instead of employees, presumably this innures them to the pain of £4.50 ($6) per hour!

[catia]

when someone comes in with a collage, or something that looks professionally done, who might have done it themselves, I ask them to produce the negatives as proof that the original image belongs to them.

And what pray tell do you ask for when someone like me who is all digital comes in? My response to you is similar to your response, "Who needs to do business with you?"

Catia

[DigitalDevo]

Originally Posted by westsidemaurice

The smallest HP printer does better work than Walmart and costs almost nothing.

Not even possible. A normal inkjet can not even compare to a Dye Sub more or less a Fuji machine. The larger machines do not actually "print" the pictures. They use lasers to put the pigments onto the photographic paper and then are pput through a chemical process similiar to regular film developing/prints. Actually, "prints" on Fuji Crystal Archive paper will most likely last longer then a film "print".

[Vikki]

The smallest HP printer does better work than Walmart and costs almost nothing.

I have to disagree with you on both points. I'm am curious though, about why you feel this way.

I have an HP, and I have had prints done through Walmart and a few other places that use Fuji Frontier printers. There is no comparison. Other than a small proof, I would never sell anyone an inkjet print. Also, have you ever calculated the costs of ink and paper for the HP, or any other home printer? It's outrageous!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending "Walmart", but rather the process. There are plenty of other places to get Fuji Frontier prints.

[brandonx49]

This is hot topic today.

My experience with Walmart has been good. At 25 cents Canadian for a 4x6 matt or glossy I'm not complaining. To purchase an expensive consumer photo printer would be a matter of convience (debateable): the cost of ink, paper, hardware; calibration; troubleshooting is hardly worth it to me and I get along with computers pretty well.

Last week I actually went to all three places in town that do the fast one hour printing. I printed a variety of 4x6 images at these shops and the quality seemed pretty much the same. One place was 29 cents an image but they did it right when I was there. Impressive.

I still have yet to try the pro shop and print 8x10's for a true quality comparison.

Eventually I hope to sell my prints to clients. Are these hour shops good enough or should I go to a professional shop.??

Places like Ofoto - how does this compare to the Walmart quality??

Tx,
Brad

[DigitalDevo]

Frankly, for selling prints I would want top notch. Shutterfly or someone who uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper on good machines! Or For super large format prints places like JumboGiant (also get canvas and watercolor prints made), or the Kodak E-Metallic paper is supposed to be super rgeat for portraits and B&W/Toned images.. Like from Mpix.. I just made an order to Mpix and am awaiting the arrival anxiously to see how this paper and their printing service stacks up. I have ordered 1000's of prints from Shutterfly with no problems at all

[westsidemaurice]

If quality is important, you want control. That means you will print it yourself. If your customers want quick and cheap and if you enjoy hanging around Walmart, have fun.

[Vikki]

If quality is important, you want control. That means you will print it yourself. If your customers want quick and cheap and if you enjoy hanging around Walmart, have fun.

I disagree with your logic, but to each his own.

[Juliana Ross]

You want good quality, you need to find a tech who knows what they are doing.

The fuji Frotier can produce some great prints but the machine is only as good as the person sitting there doing the corrections.

In eight years working as an assitant lab manger at a retailer you would not believe how many techs I had to re train because they knew little or nothing about the colour theory involved in printing.

Alot of the machines can produce a semi passable print on the full auto setting, but if it is quality you want find an operator who knows the nuts and bolts behind printing. Both Fuji and Kodak are guilty of selling thier systems under the premise that anyone can operate the machine. Indeed this is true, but I would challenge the quality .....I do not think someone who simply runs production will provide a superior print....

And a tech point on the Frontier....it operates with three solid state lasers which do an exposure direct on the paper, the dye layers are actually built into the photo paper as they always have.......

[Chip Hildreth]

This is a topic worth exploring more methodically, if I knew a way to collect the wisdom here and... wait, I've got an idea. I'll try a survey, but first, my two cents on this thread.

This is actually about an eight cent response (kinda long), I still haven't learned to edit myself very well in these forums.

COPYRIGHTS: Copyrights are synonymous to profit (wages) to professional photographers, artists, musicians and other independent creative types. I'm for them and I'm glad that mini-labs and companies like Wal-Mart respect them. A lot of nice folks simply don't understand that copying someone's work impinges on their livelyhood. Copyrights are really confusing, to explain anyway, nobody can easily understand an comply with them. ...This could be discussed for a long time so I'm gonna cut it right here.

PRINTING: This is about as subjective a subject as you are going to find. Getting a pleasing photographic print is not hard. Inkjets will do it, lasers will do it, dye subs will do it, photochemical will do it. In every case the media combination, that is, the ink/toner/film and the paper are the crucial components and they must be engineered to work together to get a nice print.
If your digital file is good, you can print well without using color profiles. What you CAN'T do, without lots of good luck anyway, is MATCH color from one media and/or printer to the next. Even with good profiles and densitometers and whatnot, you still can't match perfectly because inks, papers and processes vary in which colors they can actually print.

I've seen plenty of good prints from HP desktop printers, but I wouldn't sell them because they are not archival the ink will run if they get wet; Customers don't expect that and they will be hacked off if their print bleeds off onto the table because some Diet Coke splashed on it.

Dye Sub prints are far more resilient and make nice richly saturated prints but I don't like them because I can't afford to buy a dye sub printer or the consummables they use. They are, however, a reliable mainstay for mini-labs doing picture packages and for the kiosk printing business. They are desined to serve a large, primarily consumer oreinted market. The Wal-mart thing is out for me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is me being a control freak when it comes to technology. I have to print my own stuff so I can go straight to the source and dog-cuss when something goes wacky
.
Photo chemical is the way to print if you have a chrome or a negative but that's not the usual case anymore.

Color lasers make nice gift and business card printers but they don't reproduce color well enough to make sellable photo prints.

Archival inkjets produce high quality prints on a variety of media. When it comes to art reproduction, that is, signed, limited edition prints on artist's media like canvas or watercolor paper, archival inkjets are the clear choice. They make excellent photographic printers and you can sell the prints with confidence that they will endure anything a photochemical print will. However, like Vicki pointed out, ink cartridges will send you to the poor house. You can win this though... I'll leave a hint here and you can do your own research... Mediastreet.com - Niagara II. It works, we use them and ink cost is hardly a factor anymore.


Digital printing is in it's infancy... no, make that adolescence...

[Juliana Ross]

I sure hope no one took my explanation of the lasers in the Frontier and equated that to home laser printers...they are two totally different animals

The Frontier is by far the best industrial machine I have worked on. For a better explanation, the printer works under the same principals as the timed light with filtration exposures. The difference here is that the exposure is made with the solid state lasers (like the big sci fi kind of lasers).

The paper is still wet process like usual

[westsidemaurice]

What do you want to accomplish?

If you want customers who will spend bigger dollars you may not please them with photos that look traditionally photographic...or like what they get themselves, after their vacations, from photolabs.

Customer preference is going to evolve toward various art papers ...
they won't pay the big $$ for photos that look plastic or shiny or Walmart-ish...IMHO of course

[wtimmer]

Hi all,

I have read most of the threads here and i'm going to throw my two cents in as well. I have been in the professional photographic proccessing industry now for over 9 years (I just posted a bunch of stuff on the Introductions forum) and I have had the opprotunity to work with tons of professional printing and scanning equipment since 1994. A Fuji Frontier printer is a good machine and our lab has this piece of equipment and it does a very good job (we use it to produce 400-500,000 greeting cards per season) we also have in house a lightjet 5000 (one of the first laser exposing printers) 2 kodak Led machines, a mileca (kind of a dinosaur and not in use) and we have 2 of kodaks answer to the frontier the RP30. I have also worked with Lambdas, Large format Inkjets and film recorders. But with all that stuff said, I wanted to say that I am actually surprised that Wal-mart gave you so much hassle about printing those pictures, it has been my expierience that most professional portrait photographers are in a constant battle to keep these kiosk and 1-hour photo labs from copying their work. My father is a photographer and has actually had several large chains call him and tell him that they had "impounded" his images that were clearly copyrighted on the back and front. This is not usually the case with most of these places, hopefully that is changing but in an effort to be offensive a lot of photographers are going with what are called "proof-books" or digitally encrypted CD's or creating slideshows for proofing that customers can take home without fear of copys.

With printing I would agree that I have had to retrain several of my techs to understand how to use the machines but in my case it was actually getting them past the idea of working on a computer (most of our employees are brought up in traditional darkroom printing) Or getting my traditionally trained color qc people to understand ICC profiling, color crossovers, when to stop an image for moire patterning etc.... I would have to say though that I have never seen a inkjet or any other type of process that beats the pro-laser printers and if you happen to have a pro-lab in your area the chances of getting good (if not great) results are much better. Not to mention the archival quality of true photographic paper.... If printing your own work is your thing... then great. I'm just saying that (at least at my lab) when we look at images we have numerous tools at our disposal that the average joe cannot afford, we do this all day every day and our techs, qc people all are trained to do their jobs very well, we also have direct access to Kodak/Fuji when we run into problems (I have print sorters that stop orders for color issues! PRINT SORTERS..... they just sort them!) I guess what i'm trying to say is this. Everybody in our facility has a say in the quality that goes out.... does everyone have the FINAL say? No, but if someone feels something isn't right then nobody here wants that print to go out without a second look at least.

I guess maybe i'm just lucky to have all these toys at my disposal 24-7! and ohhhh do I use them.... LOL

Oh and p.s. this isn't a commercial for pro-labs.... I just felt the need to express the commitment to the output quality that I myself am used to. I have never set foot in Wal-Mart for a print and I don't intend too.

Bill

[wtimmer]

Oh and to Vikki, you can have complete control with a lab. Most are ICC compliant and if you are truely calibrated and willing to work in a specific color space (or at least convert to it for printing) a lot of labs offer super fast turn around times with no color correction. The only risk is you not being calibrated.

[Ed_L]

Hi Bill,

If you yell real loud I might be able to hear you. I'm from Cal Township! For those of you who have no idea about the lab Bill works at, I can tell you that particular lab has been putting out top notch quality for many years! I'm pretty sure that's what prompted his post. In the past, I've used other pro labs as well. It hasn't always been top quality coming out of them, with the exception of Burrell's (that's where Bill works). By the way Bill, does Dave Marciniak still work there? He taught me a lot about photography.

Ed

[wtimmer]

Hi Ed,

Nice to hear from someone local, unfortunatly with the buyout that has happened in the last year a lot of cuts were made. Including Dave Marciniak, he was and is a friend of mine and we all sorely miss him. But on another note: I'll just introduce myself real quick, my name's Bill Timmer and I am the Production Systems Administrator for Burrell Professional's network of labs. (like i said I posted in introductions) and might I add, I am very happy to find a forum like this and I hope I can find many new friends here as well as show off some of my abilities! I love talking with other people in our industry and I can't read fast enough!!!! LOL!!!!