Why Professional Photo Printing Is a Necessity for Phenomenal Photos

Posted by Lauren


Before I got into the business of photo printing, like most people I did not truly understand the difference between professional photo printing and inkjet or other types of photo printing. By teaming up with a professional photo printing company, I quickly learned the difference between the two. And boy what a difference it is! This has become so very important to me, and I hope that by explaining what sets professional photo printing apart, you will share my enthusiasm.

Very few people understand what is meant by professional photo printing, particularly real photo paper processing. Kodak Endura real photo paper is a high quality, long-lasting paper that creates incredible photos by exposure to light and silver halide processing. No matter your skill level, once you see your photos printed on real photo paper, you will never want them printed any other way again.

So How Does This Process Work?

To spare you a lot of scientific jargon, let me give you the basics. The photo paper is exposed to light from a laser light. The exposure stimulates chemicals in the paper by covering it with very small diamond shapes. They overlap so that there are many diamonds all over the paper. The paper then goes through a warm RA4 chemical bath to stimulate as well as seal the colors. Due to the light sensitive paper, it is still loaded in a darkroom. The machines are also adjusted with every new roll of paper to make sure color quality is always consistent. Therefore, the colors in your photos will match the colors in all photos in the future as well. This is particularly great if you sell reprints of a photo.

Why Should I Care?

Professional, real photo paper processing is a process used to develop the photos of many professional photographers. When you have a professional photographer shoot an event such as your wedding or you have portraits made, they more than likely have the photos developed using this process. The intensity and depth of color created by the diamonds is so superior that it’s crazy to even compare these photos with photos made using inkjet processing. They have unbelievable neutral and black duplication as well. Unfortunately, a lot and I mean MOST of the places that people get their photos printed are not professional photo printers and use inkjet to print your priceless photos. Even some professional labs that expose photos to light using this process still use inkjet or press printing as well. So make sure that you ask how your photos will be printed before you decide on a professional lab or where you want to print your photos!

Kodak Endura media is held to an extremely high standard. Professional Kodak Endura real photo paper and media go through meticulous assessments to ensure a consistently superior product. Kodak makes sure that their products meet the highest standards in many areas including color, reproduction, and post processing.

How Long Will They Last?

Kodak Endura real photographs will last over one hundred years before they begin to fade if they are displayed. When stored in the dark they will last over two hundred years before they start to fade.

The Bottom Line

You absolutely cannot beat the amazing quality of Kodak Endura real photos. Not only do they last forever, they have extremely vivid color as well. Once you have your photos printed and processed on professional Kodak Endura real photo paper, I can assure you that you will never have them printed any other way again.

Facebook or Traditional Photo Albums to Preserve Your Precious Memories?

Posted by Lauren


With the era of the internet and the amount of time people spend on Facebook and other social networks, it’s easy to become engrossed in this new way to communicate with others by living out our lives online. Many Facebook users upload recent photos to their profiles to share them with their Facebook friends and to show people what’s new in their lives. Since Facebook has revolutionized the way we interact and share photos, it is very easy to make printing photos secondary or forget to print them entirely. While I understand why it is more advantageous to upload photos to Facebook first, we must not forget that overtime having prints and photo albums to recall and cherish the past will be much more important to us. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that we put as much if not more importance on printing photos than we do on uploading them to Facebook.

There are several reasons that we prioritize uploading photos to Facebook before printing them. Mainly, we just want to share photos to show people what we’re doing, to show off our children, or to share the photos from a recent vacation, to name a few. These photos aren’t just about your life right now; they are memories that should not be lost in the black hole that is the billions of photos on Facebook. Facebook is a forum to share your life with others. It is not a place to keep treasured memories.

Would you only put important photos such as your wedding photos on Facebook without printing them? Believe it or not, some people do! It’s not intentional, but a photographer gives them a disc of their photos and they upload them to Facebook and just never print them. Of course, they will definitely get around to it one day, right? You would be surprised. The same goes for any other sentimental photos that you put on Facebook. If people aren’t printing their wedding photos, then it goes without saying that they aren’t thinking about printing a random photo they took of their baby either. After all, “it was just to show to people on Facebook anyway, wasn’t it?”

Although it is perfectly fine to put your cherished photos on Facebook, it is without question a mistake to let them get lost among the candid, silly, or virtually meaningless photos that you also post. Facebook photos are for quick viewing so that your friends can keep up with your life. This is of course very important, but you must be careful not to become too consumed with this way of experiencing photos that you forget they are also invaluable memories to be treasured and protected. 

Uploading Photos versus Facebook Privacy: You Don’t Have to Choose

Posted by Lauren


In the past, I’ve written about Facebook Privacy and how it affects your photos by discussing the new photo viewer and how it allows people to print your photos. I also explained how to change your Facebook Privacy settings for a photo album, photos you’re tagged in, and photos you post to your wall. I want to further delve into this topic by explaining why you do not have to sacrifice uploading photos on Facebook for the sake of privacy. Instead, you can sort photos to keep them separate for co-workers, friends, and family during the upload process. This allows you to have one Facebook account while maintaining the separate parts of your life.

Just because someone has a photo they don’t want someone to see on Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean it’s inappropriate (well, maybe sometimes), usually they just want some privacy and the freedom to post photos without being judged. Luckily, with the extensive privacy options available on Facebook you can easily separate the different parts of your life so that you don’t have to think twice about whether or not you want to upload a questionable photo. It’s easy to do. Just follow these steps each time you upload new photos to Facebook.

When creating a photo album you can change the privacy for that album so that only certain people can see it and others cannot.

Facebook lets you control privacy two different ways to make it easier for you. For a particular album you can either choose certain people that you only want to be able to see the album, or a handful of people that you do not. Obviously, whichever has the smallest number is the one that you want to choose. To make this easier to understand let me give you two scenarios.

Scenario 1: Say you went to a concert with 5 of your friends and you only want them to be able to see the photos from that album. In this case you would do the following:

Under “Make this visible to these people” select “Specific People...” From there you can type the beginning of each person’s name and choose the correct person from the list of people that appears. Continue typing in names until you have selected the entire list of people that you want to see the album. Only the people you selected will be able to see the album and no one else.

Scenario 2: You recently went to dinner with friends and you had a beer. You took photos and there were clearly alcoholic beverages on the table. Your grandmother doesn’t know that you drink and you had to accept her friend request! No worries, when you are uploading the photos for that album under “Hide this from these people” begin typing the name of your grandmother or whoever else you don’t want to see the album and voile, they can’t see them. Pretty cool isn’t it?

You can also change the Privacy Settings for photos you are tagged in as well; you just can’t change them for specific photos only ALL of the photos you are tagged in. Go to Account in the upper right corner of Facebook, then select “Privacy Settings”, from there click on “Customize Settings” in the middle of the page. Under “Things others share” and “Photos and videos I’m tagged in” Click on “Edit Settings” then you can select “Custom” from the drop down menu. You can then choose who to hide tagged photos from or who can see tagged photos of you as described above.

The Bottom Line

Don’t stress anymore about the photos you post on Facebook. Make it a habit to edit the Privacy Settings of your albums when you upload them, and don’t forget to change the Privacy Settings of your photos that are already on Facebook. 

Facebook Privacy and Your Photos

Posted by Lauren


With all the changes to Facebook Privacy and the new photo viewer, it's hard to tell just who can see your photos and what they can do with them. In this post I will explain what you need to know about the new photo viewer and how people can download and possibly print your photos. I will also outline how to change your Facebook Privacy settings to give you complete control over who sees your photos and what they are allowed to do with them.


The New Photo Viewer


The new photo viewer on Facebook provides users with a very different way to view photos than the old version. When you click on a photo or album, a photo viewer pops up so that looking at someone's photos becomes your main focus. Not only is there a pop up display that grabs your intention, but your profile is also grayed out behind the photo viewer so that all of your attention is on the photo you are looking at. As someone who can easily be distracted by the many ads and links on Facebook that can divert your attention, I personally like the new way to view photos. As with any new change on Facebook, there will always be some people who appreciate the change and others who don't like it or even hate it. Therefore, I think it's best to lay out the facts so that you can form your on opinion as well as make informed decisions about how you want to use Facebook from now on.


Features of the New Photo Viewer 

• The name of the album and who created it is located under the photo on the left side.
• You can "Like" a photo or leave a comment under it.
• You can tag, share, download, or report the photo.
• You can look through the photos in an album by either clicking on the photo or using the forward and backward arrows.
• When you're finished looking at photos, click the white X located in the upper right corner of the photo viewer.

If Someone Can See a Photo They Can Print It


Likewise, if you can see a photo you can print it. Each photo has a "Download" or "Download This Photo" button in the lower left corner below it. All you have to do is click on this button and choose the location on your hard drive where you want to download and save the photo. From there you can upload the photo to any online photo printer and get a copy.


While this may seem surprising to some of you, the truth is that even before this "Download" button was made available, anyone that could see a photo could still download and save it by right clicking on the photo and selecting "Save As". They could also print a copy of the photo once it was saved on their hard drive.


You have always been able to download and save a photo from Facebook and then print it, but now Facebook provides a "Download" button to make it easier and more obvious for people who didn't realize it before.


What You Need to Consider First

Before you start worrying about what people may do with your photos, I want you to step back and think for a moment about the chances that someone is going to print a photo that they are just looking at and have no personal interest in (i.e. they are tagged in the photo or were at the event). Unless you are a photographer with interesting photos, then people probably aren't going to want to print your photos. As I said previously, they could also download and print them before Facebook updated the photo viewer. 

If you don't want someone to print an embarrassing photo of you such as that crazy photo from spring break, then it's safe to say you don't want them to see it either. Use the guidelines below to change your Privacy Settings.

How to Change Your Facebook Privacy Settings


So as you probably have realized by now, the only way to prevent someone from downloading and printing your photos is to block them from being able to see them. In this section of the post I will outline how to do this.


Photos You Post


1. Go to "Account" in the upper right corner of Facebook then "Privacy Settings".
2. Click on "Customize Settings" in blue in the middle of the page.
3. Beside "Posts by me" under "Things I share" click on the drop down menu where you can choose from Everyone, Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, and Customize.
4. If you don't like any of the other options, click on Customize where you can choose to whom to make photos visible and/or who to hide them from.


Photos You Are Tagged In


1. Go to "Account" in the upper right corner of Facebook then "Privacy Settings".
2. Click on "Customize Settings" in blue in the middle of the page.
3. Beside "Photos and videos I'm tagged in" under "Things others share" click on the drop down menu where you can choose from Everyone, Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, and Customize.

4. If you don't like any of the other options, click on Customize where you can choose to whom to make photos visible and/or who to hide them from.

Your Albums


1. Click on the album and under the photos click "Edit Album Info".
2. From there you can click on the drop down beside "Privacy" under "Edit Info".
3. Choose from Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, and Customize.
4. If you don't like any of the other options, click on Customize where you can choose to whom to make photos visible and/or who to hide them from.


I hope this post was helpful and I look forward to reading your comments!