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Rangefinder Magazine
June 2003

Your Own Digital Lab... by Jeff Smith
Never Say Never!

When I started in photography, I was like most young photographers. I used black-and- white film and then took over one of my mother’s bathrooms to develop all the film I shot. My black-and-white darkroom/bathroom eventually turned into a color darkroom. At that point I was 16, but I realized that for every hour I spent doing what I wanted to do, which was taking pictures, I spent three hours developing them.

Specializing in senior portraits, a die cutter for wallets is a must. This die cutter, made by Rotec, is one of the few on the market that “kiss cuts” wallets, which leaves them them attached to the page, but able to pop out easily

Once I opened my studio, I found that poverty kept me in the darkroom, because I couldn’t afford to send my black and whites to an outside lab. The happiest day of my life was when we finally had enough money to send out all of our work to an outside lab. I washed the chemicals off my hands for the last time and never looked back.

The next 15 years of my life without a darkroom was a pleasant time. Then, like many photographers today, I made the decision to go digital. The lab that had provided me with years of beautiful printing from negatives, started giving me skin tones that don’t exist in nature. Blonde hair and purple skin wasn’t the look we were going for.

In addition to the problems of quality with the digital images we received from our lab, was the cost of working on the digital files. With negatives, we cut the negatives marked our order and sent it off to the lab. The next time we saw the order it was beautifully finished, ready to package. If it wasn’t perfect, we simply marked it “remake” and sent it back. We were charged for each service, like negative retouching, mounting and spraying, but with the volume of two studios, the prices were very competitive. With digital, all that’s changed.

With digital we had to take over doing all the work, with the exception of hitting the print button, and we were charged the same price for digital output as printing from negatives. This meant our lab bill was going to stay the same, but I would have to employ additional people to get all the files ready for the lab. As a businessperson, I didn’t see the logic in handling my digital files this way.

I started having impure thoughts, about going back to something I never wanted to do again. While I was in no hurry to open a lab, the cost of time dealing with digital images made it a realistic option. I had to hire additional employees anyway, so why not use the profit that our lab made from our work to help pay for them. In theory it sounded good, but it had been a long time since I worked in a darkroom and I was in no hurry to have the smell and mess in my studio again.

Most digital cameras have auto white balance, which works well most of the time in most conditions. The problem is that certain colors will change the skin tone that is captured. When you manually set the white balance these changes don’t happen as long as the light source stays the same.

After talking with photographers and equipment companies, I was convinced that I didn’t need to have the mess and smell of a photographic processor. Everyone told me of the spectacular results that photographers were achieving with various types of print devices. I found out two things. Photographers as a group are some cheap people. If there is a way to save a buck, even if quality suffers, they will give it a try!

I did the research and found that we had three options and two weren’t really options. Some photographers have been using ink type printing devices. While the image quality looks impressive, the durability and feel of the product leaves clients with a product that they could produce at home. We use ink printers for quick printing jobs that are for publication—a print that will not be handled frequently and only needs to last for a short period of time. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t feel comfortable delivering a senior photograph that will hang in my client’s home for the next 30 years printed in this method.

The second option was one that we tried many years ago for printing our yearbooks. While dye-sub printers have improved (with a lower output cost and faster printing times) they are still much more expensive to operate than printing on photographic paper and are still very slow for a volume business. Although the cost of the printers isn’t as much as the photographic type printers, multiple machines would be needed to keep up with the workflow.

The third option seemed like the perfect solution. The digital printers that actually printed on photographic paper using a CRT. I had seen the Fuji Frontier and some of the other printers in that same price range—really nice, but really expensive. I wanted to start a lab and actually pay for the equipment before it became obsolete.

We were at a tradeshow and I saw a digital printer/paper processor. I looked at it, they gave us a demonstration and I got excited. The unit was a Net-Printer from Gretag. The NetPrinter, as well as other digital printers from other makers, are self-contained printers/processors that print on almost any photographic paper. Our NetPrinter prints up to a 12x18 inch print at 500 dpi. The average cost per 8x10 unit is around 35–45 cents and can print up to 200 units per hour. That’s not bad, even with our volume. With this machine, I saw a way to pay for all those extra employees.

In the first three months after installing the machine, I was having darkroom flashbacks, but without the smell. (You can purchase odorless chemistry now!) It wasn’t nearly as easy as we expected it to be. Printing on the machine, which is loaded with ICC profiles for most popular digital papers, got us up and running quickly, but getting acceptable results consistently took some time. We purchased the EyeOne calibration software to calibrate each monitor and write specific ICC profiles for the machine. This got the monitors close to the final output on paper, but we had to learn to interpret the subtle differences between the colors and contrast of the monitor and how they reproduce on a specific paper. We also found that the machine produced much better results with certain types of papers then with others.

We are now going on a year with our lab. The staff is trained to interpret color, the customers are happy and I have actually stopped taking orders home to work on at night. The additional costs, which would have been my lab’s profit, have stayed in the studio to pay for our trained employees. For our studio this was a necessary step to make digital as profitable as shooting with film.

	When you print your own digital work, you learn that consistent color is more important than perfect color. After years of dealing with an outside lab and shooting film, my consistency suffered. It was my lab’s job to match all the skin tones of an order together to please the client. Now we are the lab, so we shoot it exactly the way we want it to print.

When shooting digital, controlling costs becomes very important. While most photographers are excited about digital right now, I don’t think that many are considering how much of their “free time” is being taken up preparing orders for a lab, that is charging them the same amount. Why would you raise your cost, reduce your profit and work more hours to change from film to digital?

In my travels I have heard photographers talk about the huge sales that digital has brought to their studios, paying for all the additional cost involved with shooting digital. When you look at the way in which they show their clients their images and the sales process they go through with their clients, it is exactly the same as they did with film. They create proofs, present the proofs in a week and hope for an order. I have to ask, if everything is the same, how are sales going to increase to cover the additional cost of wages, equipment, constant upgrading of that equipment, as well as all the free time that you as the business owner must give up. I don’t think that special effects images are going to increase sales quite that much. As your costs go up (which any photographer who has done an analysis on film versus digital will tell you), you have to look for ways to pay for those additional costs. I can say that the addition of our lab has made it possible to create higher profits from digital than were possible with film.

The NetPrinter takes care of all of our printing needs up to the standard size of 11x14. Since we only work with seniors, that makes up around 95 percent of our printing needs. For larger prints we still use an outside lab. We print the order with a sample 8x10 for color matching. We then send the prepared file and the sample 8x10 so the larger wall portrait matches the rest of the order.

As we prepared our lab, there were many services that our labs provided that required specific machinery. Most photographers never think about die cutting. The die cutter that “kiss cuts” wallets is a simple looking machine, but it costs over $4000. With film, we used to have the lab texture our proofs to make it more difficult to scan and reproduce them by our clients. This texture machine costs over $2000. I was quite surprised by the cost of many of these items.

This is our main printer for the studio. It is a Gretag NetPrinter. It produces images up to 12x18. We send out all prints over 11x14 to an outside lab.

We sat down and figured out which of these services we needed to provide and which we could live without to stay within budget. Those items we needed, we shopped e-Bay and used equipment companies for bargains. The services and equipment we could live without, we put on a list to purchase someday, like after the machine is paid for.
I am often asked at what point is a lab an option for a studio or how high does your lab bill have to be before considering it. To that I say, “it depends on your lab!” When some photographers talk about how much they pay for their lab work, I am amazed. There is no golden number or ideal amount of volume. I would consider a lab a viable option when one year’s lab bill would equal the cost of putting in the lab. At this point the lab will pay for itself before the equipment becomes obsolete. Some photographers might find it feasible with a lower lab bill and some might find it doesn’t make sense with a much higher lab bill, you have to do the math. And always, you should talk with your accountant about major purchases and the tax advantages of leasing, compared to purchasing, before making any decisions.

Over the last 30 years, photographers have looked for ways to get the labs out of their studios, sending their work to an outside lab and focusing on what makes them the most money. Labs became better and better at providing services for competitive pricing, adding to this trend. With digital, this trend will be changing. More digital companies are entering into the market that service the studio-owned lab and more studios are finding it necessary to bring the lab back into their studios to make digital as profitable as film.

Jeff Smith owns and operates Jeff Smith’s Photoique in Fresno, California. The studio now has its own web site, which features articles by Smith and other information: www.jeffsmithphoto.com/