Costco's photo printer service

I had heard a while ago that costco would now print 16x20 and 20x30 in house in their stores instead of at a lab. I never thought much about it assuming that the quality would be low until I noticed at my local lab that they are using Epson 7880 printers. These are really high quality printers using fantastic inks. Even better, costco subcontracts with dry creek photo who regularly profile the printers and provide instructions on how to use the ICC profiles. These profiles also work great in Lightroom. I sent a few very large files to my local costco and had them print and the prints are gorgeous. Basically perfect color reproduction using the supplied profiles, fantastic toning and very vibrant colors. I was floored that they can offer these prints for the ridiculously low prices they charge ($8.99 for a 20x30). There is no way you can print this large yourself for anywhere near this price. The paper is not extremely good, but pretty reasonable and this gives you a closed loop color management. Pretty amazing.

Great prints from labs

Earlier I wrote about a workflow to get beautiful prints from labs such as costcos using Lightroom and external apps. In the new Lightroom 2.0 beta, Adobe has heard our prayers and the print module (unfortunately still not the normal export) now allows output to jpeg in arbitrary color profiles. This works beautifully.

Here is an example setup: (click for full size)



I set up a custom paper size in the page setup panel for 5x7 images without any margins, and setup the image in the print panel. Then I select print to jpeg, set the resolution to 300 (the resolution most Frontiers and Noritsus print at), set print sharpening to the paper kind and desired sharpening (I've found from testing that low or medium works really well even though these settings are not really meant for photographic lab printers). Then in the color management tab I select the profile from my lab (my local costcos in this case) and what kind of rendering I prefer. Then hit print to file and I get a jpeg file with the right profile and size/resolution/sharpening that I can upload and print (don't forget to turn off color correction for printing your images otherwise all your hard work is for naught). Very handy. Unfortunately, multipage jpeg output is still broken in that it gives you a set of files without extensions. They are normal jpeg files though. Also, there should be an option to not include the profile in the output file. Often these profiles are gigantic (my costco one for example is 1.5 MB) and they add substantial time to the upload to the lab. I usually strip them using a photoshop droplet, but this could be much handier. Also, there still is no softproof here anywhere.

Anyway, here is the result of such an exercise with the slide image after conversion to sRGB for web display and scaling/sharpening for display.


Enjoy your prints. Note that you should not bother with any of this if you do not calibrate your screen using calibration hardware. Screen calibration is the first requisite for getting good color prints. Secondary to that is using lab printer profiles. With an uncalibrated screen - no matter how expensive - you will never see the correct color anyway.

A (mildly) Lightroom workflow for printing at costcos and getting superb color

Update: see edit at the end:

Update II (5/20/08): Lightroom 2.0 has made this workflow unnecessary. Check out my post on it.

I decided to detail my printing workflow I follow in Lightroom and Photoshop. This workflow will yield photographs up to 12"x18" (the largest most places print in 1-hour service - not a real limitation) with color and dynamic range rivaling and in some cases exceeding very expensive inkjets, but at a fraction of the cost. I use costcos for this purpose as they are fast, good, provide icc profiles and close to where I live, but I am sure other comparable labs will do fine too with a similar workflow. Labs that use Noritsus or Fuji Frontiers will all have very similar quality. My local costcos uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, which is somewhat thin for larger prints, but gives excellent color fidelity and deep dynamic range. The machines raster scan a laser at three colors over this paper to expose the paper which is then developed using conventional chemical processes. You're actually getting a real photograph from a digital file. The workflow I'll discuss is done in photoshop, but you could use any program that can convert images between icc profiles. For example preview.app from Apple. This sort of sequence is necessary because Lightroom will not export directly to arbitrary icc profiles. Hopefully that will be built in in a future version?¹

Preparation:
1. The first step is to download and install the icc profiles for your lab. Costcos makes them available on their photo upload pages, but they are actually done by dry creek. You can see if you can find your lab there. Download them and install them in a place where photoshop and other color managed apps can find them. On Macs that is simply ~/Library/ColorSync/Profiles or/Library/ColorSync/Profiles. On windows it is somewhere deep in the crypts of the OS. Check this page for instructions. Once installed, you should once every few months check if there is an updated profile.
2. Set up photoshop correctly. Many photoshop installations are setup incorrectly due to bad information floating around on the web. The way You should set it up is to respect embedded profiles and warn for profile mismatches. You get to the dialog in Edit:Color Settings. See below for a suggested setting:

Here I've disclosed the extra options, but they are usually correct. I'm just showing them for reference. The setting for the RGB working space is not that important. Setting it to ppRGB just makes photoshop throw up fewer warnings. When you get a color space mismatch warning when loading a file, always choose "preserve embedded profile." NEVER EVER choose "discard"

So only the top two options are meaningful. Now you have setup Photoshop correctly and it is time to describe the actual workflow:

Workflow:
1. Select the photos you want to print and crop them to the desired aspect ratios of your final prints. Typical print sizes are 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, 8x12, 12x18, etc, so your usual ratios are 2x3, 5x7 and 4x5.

2. Export your photos from Lightroom using the prophotoRGB profile (why ppRGB? check here) in a 16-bits Tiff or psd. At this point I use two different workflows depending on mood. I either scale in the output dialog of Lightroom, or in Photoshop. You should scale to your desired size at a resolution of 300 ppi approximately as this is the approximate resolution of the photomachines.



It s a good idea to create a preset for this.

3. Open one of the exported files in Photoshop.

4. If you did not yet scale to the final size, do it now using the Image->Image size dialog. Again, use 300 ppi for the resolution and type the size in inches or cm of your final print, making sure you have "resample images" checked. This will calculate the actual needed image dimensions in pixels for you and scale to that size. At this stage I use bicubic sampling for the resizing, but you could use whatever algorithm you prefer or perhaps a plugin such as Genuine Fractals.

5. Sharpen for final output. The machines have a resolution of 300 ppi approximately, but they are soft at that resolution which you should try to counteract to get the best prints. You can use many third party sharpeners for this purpose, but to keep this tutorial simple, I'll show you how to use the unsharp mask in Photoshop. Before I open this dialog, I usually zoom the image to 50%. The filter can be found in Filter->Sharpen. Zooming to 50% is a very old trick that allows you to judge the effect of the sharpening fairly well on screen. The settings below are fairly typical for me. An amount of about 150%, a radius between 0.5 and 1 and a threshold of 5 (to avoid sharpening noise).



This should look only slightly crunchy in the 50% preview in the big window. Experiment with this to see what works best.

6. Now comes the important step.² In the Edit menu, choose "convert to profile." In the dialog, choose the profile for your printing service:



7. Convert to 8-bit color (Image->Mode->8 Bits/Channel.

8. Save as a reasonably high quality jpeg:


Make sure you do not select the embed color profile option. The machines ignore the profile anyway and the profiles are usually around 1.5 MB, so to save you upload time, do not embed it. Give it a name that describes which profile you used and to which size you scaled it so that you can identify it later.

9. Repeat steps 3 to 8 for all your photos

10. Upload to your lab and print!

You can easily create a Photoshop droplet for all this if you basically always go to the same size. Also check out my older articles detailing how to use the print panel in Lightroom to do basically the same thing, but including logos and such. Here is the original article and here I explain how to add borders and such.

Notes:
¹ At this point I should note that you could do this all with just sRGB files. However, in my experience, the color reproduction is not as good as I like. Using custom profiles gets me exact color reproduction.
² At this point you could first softproof to correct for any out-of-gamut colors. I'll leave that for a later article.

UPDATE: Timothy Armes brought out a plugin for Lightroom that does all this without the need for Photoshop.

Relevant example for ppRGB vs adobeRGB

I realized after the last post that I need to give a real world example. The example that I am going to give is from the recent shot below:

.

I took this into Photoshop in 16-bit ppRGB and softproofed it to the profile of my local costco's Noritsu and to adobeRGB. In both cases, I show the gamut warning (in grey).

Here is the soft proof for adobeRGB (click for large version):


As you can see a lot is out of gamut in the mountain area that is lit by the rising sun. Especially the green of the trees is far out.

Now take a look at the same for the local costcos:


Far less is out of gamut. Especially the green/yellow of the lit trees is not at all out of gamut, while it was in adobeRGB. This clearly shows that in real world images, you lose colors that even not so wide gamut machines can print if you use adobeRGB as a working space. Of course, there are not really any displays that can actually display these colors...

Why use prophotoRGB instead of adobeRGB as a working color space?

Lightroom uses a variant of prophotoRGB as its internal colorspace and when you export to photoshop, it defaults to prophotoRGB. One could argue that this is overkill and adobeRGB should be wide enough. However, typical DSLRs can easily capture color outside of adobeRGB. "What does that matter if you cannot print those colors?", you might ask. The answer is that as soon as your printer has more inks than just CMYK, you can reproduce colors outside of adobeRGB! This can be easily shown when comparing profiles in Apple's excellent and free colorsync utility app. Even worse, you do not need a good printer to reproduce these colors, if you send your images to Costco's, Adorama, smugmug, and such for printing, you could be using their profiles for conversion and you would be able to reproduce color outside of adobeRGB. Don't believe me, here is the proof:



The wireframe in this graph is adobeRGB, the solid, colored volume is the glossy profile from my local costcos. As you can see the costco profile indicates that their Noritsu in this case can generate color outside of adobeRGB! Now compare this with the same figure for prophotoRGB:



As you see the entire range of colors that costcos printers can reproduce is enclosed.
Of course if you are working in less than 16 bits (everything in LR is 16 bit, so that is not anything to worry about), ppRGB might not be a good choice as you blow up the difference between 2 color values too much and you might get posterization. Fortunately, basically everything in Photoshop is 16 bits nowadays. So for prints from costco, a good workflow is to export to 16-bit ppRGB tiffs/psds, convert to the right profile in photoshop and then convert to 8-bit and save as a jpeg.