SmugMug Prints Arrived
They arrived with an apology from the local Post. SmugMug was not at fault, nor was EZPrint. They proceeded diligently, but there was a mistake done in the post here.
The prints arrived rolled in a tube and the tube was in… nothing. The parcel was just the tube. Nothing happened and the tube appears strong enough to protect the prints, but all in all it does not give the same impression as the parcel I got from ExposureManager. I thought they used the same lab, but they don’t. Also, there is a prominent SmugMug label on the tube, inviting the customer to contact them in case of problem. As I said before, the customer buys from SmugMug, not from me, and is reminded so.
I had ordered the same prints on the 3 different papers. To my surprise, I actually prefer the glossy one to the luster. There is a bigger surprise: metamerism failure. All three papers show a tint under some lighting.
Under natural light, glossy is neutral, matte is slightly warm and luster is green. Under tungsten, luster is neutral and the other two are pink. I don’t notice anything similar with the EM print on luster. They both use Fuji Frontier printers and both use the same Fuji paper, so I don’t know.
All three prints are from the same file and all three were ordered at the same paper size. They are supposed to print borderless yet one of the three has a white border on one side. Precision appears to be so-so. The problem here is that, unlike ExposureManager, SmugMug does not allow for proper separation between the file used for screen presentation and actual print files. Borderless prints are useless for framing! How can’t they understand that?
All in all, this shows amply that SmugMug can not be a solution to sub-contract orders fulfillment.
Hi, I’m your House Professional at SmugMug
I’d love to investigate your order - we unconditionally guarantee every single print .. if you wouldn’t mind writing our help desk ATTN: Andy in the subject line, and sending me your order#, I’ll review it and get back to you. I do tons and tons of black and white work myself, but our lab isn’t set up for “true black and white” yet, so it sometimes takes a bit of special tweaking to get the files just right for B&W. I hope you’ll contact me and I look forward to working on this with you, and getting you prints you are thrilled with
Thanks!
PS: Your stuff is really good, I particularly liked the Dungeness shot and Kent in the Mist!
Andy,
Thanks for all this. You really provide outstanding support!
However, if all it took was a tweaking of the files, I’d be working with SmugMug today. The reasons I don’t are:
1/ No practical way to have custom files for each format of each photo. That makes it impossible to produce prints of a controlled size independent of the paper size in order to provide a white border for framing purposes.
2/ Branding. Right or wrong, I’d rather have my customers feel they buy from me than from a third party. In their mind, if they want a print from me, it means they trust me, not a third party I would impose to them. Especially if it is for portraiture. Of course they can imagine I don’t make mugs myself, but there is no reason why they should deal with anyone else.
Regarding the metamerism failure, I will try to get more prints from EM. I appears it is a problem with B&W on Fuji Frontier, so they should be affected too (and I am worried now). If it is not solvable, I’ll resume doing the printing myself. I am not sure how soft proofing can help to evaluate tints that only appear under some lighting.
PS: Thanks for the compliment!