wal-mart owns walgreens
Where do photographers print their photos?

Good morning.

I second fhotoace on Costco. Their equipment is superb, and they are doing great job at prices you will not likely to find in pro labs. The key is – you upload your images from home to costco.com and order to pick up in store. If you do this – you can select an option to not auto-correct your images as many consumer labs do, so that they print exactly like you made it (assuming you have post processed your images yourself). Then in addition to that Costco has free access online to the ICC profiles of each individual printer in each store, download one for your store and if you have software like photoshop and good calibrated monitor – you will be able to match the colors exactly to what you want to print.

Then as fhotoace said- there is an option to add a line of text printed on the back of each image, which could be “(C) YOUR NAME – DO NOT REPRODUCE” if you want to mark your proofs like that, or just the name of an event you’re printing, etc.

Last but not least – Costco labs (at least in my local store) are willing to work with you to get the results you wanted. Back in the days when online upload was not there yet, I would hand them a CD with my images and instructions how to print them (rather than inserting it into automatic terminal), e.g. not to do auto correction and what sizes I wanted, etc. They would do it for me, and if they got it wrong, they’d reprint as many times as needed. But with photo upload feature that allows to disable auto correction this became non-issue now. As I usually get back precisely what I wanted anyway.

LEM.