I set up most of my pages with the photos floating in the middle, leaving a thick white border around them. The interface for designing a book is simple, but you can organize your photos in some creative ways.
It's a Java-based desktop app that, once set up, greatly improves the experience. If you want to upload a lot of photos to Nations, the far better option is to use the third-party app ROES (Remote Order Entry System). It's slow and sometimes difficult to navigate (and I never could get it to give me a receipt). What I really dislike about Nations is the website.
Nations' color correction does an excellent job with skin tones, and it produces the best portrait-style prints of the services I tested. The results for portraits are much better. Highlights, especially bright white clouds against a blue sky, lack detail compared to the same images from Printique. While the prints are high quality, I found that many times-especially with landscapes-colors are washed out. It's hard to imagine anything ever happening to your images in transit the way the company secures them, although shipping times are among the slowest. Nations Photo Lab prints on quality paper, and the packaging is the best of the bunch. You can import images from directly from your computer or from an array of other places, including Dropbox, Facebook, Flickr, Google Photos, Instagram, and Lightroom. Colors are very true to life, with rich blacks and good details in both shadows and highlights.Īnother place Printique shines is in the photo-upload process. I went for the Kodak Endura Luster paper (which is also what Mpix uses). Printique is on the pricier end, but the extra money gets you much better prints.
I also like the option to print the date and file name on the back of each image. Part of the reason is its options: You can choose a range of papers, and they're listed by their actual names like Kodak Endura or Fujifilm Matte.
In the end, I went with Mpix because you get free shipping, and frequent sales make it cheaper, but if printing quality is your only concern, Printique wins by a hair. Choosing between Printique and Mpix was one of the toughest calls I've had to make in this job. The highest-quality prints in my testing came from Adorama's Printique service, formerly called Adoramapix. All prices are for standard 4 x 6 prints.
Here are the best places to print your photos. To make sure you don't end up with prints of your kids with orange skin against green skies (yes, that happened in one test), we assembled a collection of photos designed to test color, tonal range, blacks, whites, and more, and fired them off to nearly a dozen services. Unfortunately, some of them are truly awful at printing your images. In place of the 1-hour-photo booths, there are endless online printing services, most of which produce far better results than the kiosks ever did. Those kiosks abruptly disappeared, taking our photo printing options with them.ĭeveloping film isn't commonplace today, but the desire to have a photograph as an object has never faded. Then came the digital camera, and suddenly there was no film to develop. Little kiosks were sprinkled across strip mall parking lots like pepper on a bad steak. Suburban America used to contain roughly one 1-hour photo lab for every 500 people.