Just over a month ago, I wrote Selling your Photography; a far too brief look at some of the options available online for selling ones photography as prints. The aim, finding a online print seller who would sell your prints for you, without too much effort from your side. The saying “There is no such thing as a free lunch” is apt here and the results were predictably bad. While there are many sites providing the ability to sell art online, getting sales on them is always going to take work.
Today however, I will look at the actual prints that two of these companies produce. My reasoning went that, although I was selling prints on multiple sites, my own marketing efforts should be directed towards the site that gives me the best combination of print options, cost, profit and of course, print quality. It didn’t take much effort to whittle this down to just two sites, Deviant Art & Imagekind. Both these sites provide a large selection of sizes (with some limitations on both), both allow the artist to set the price (above a specified base cost).
Three of the four criteria are easily compared just by looking at the web sites; but the fourth, print quality, required that I actually order prints from both sites. I decided on an image that I thought would test the print quality in both resolution and colour accuracy; one of my newer photos, Autumn’s Warmth.
I’ve bought prints through DeviantArt before, the process is simple, the prices for artists incredibly cheap. The problem was the image aspect ratio. This was a 2:1 panorama, and Deviantart only provides one size in this aspect ratio, 8 by 4 inches. Deviantart offers a huge number of print size (a definite plus), but only in set aspect ratios; some ratios better represented than others (a definite minus if you love panoramas). The shipping options ranged from cheap to expensive and covered all my needs. Deviantart prints are on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, with the options of Glossy, Luster and Matte.
Imagekind provides less size options, but the ratio of the photo is not limited. I chose the smallest print I could, which turned out to be 10 by 5 inches. The selection of papers is huge, and while the Epson glossy and enhanced matt are cheap quality options, I chose the Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl paper. Shipping options were limited, with only two rather expensive FedEx options available. FedExing to South Africa was going to be more than I could afford. This is where Imagekind really impressed; I emailed their customer care person, and after discussing my problem with her, she organised that my print be shipped to me via USPO at a greatly reduced price from their standard FedEx rates.
So far so good.
Deviantart wins on cost, just over a $5 including shipping. Imagekinds print cost was more, and although I could have chosen a cheaper paper, the cheapest option would have still come in at about 3 times the cost when shipping is included. The larger the print size, the less of an issue this is, with both sites charging essentially the same price for larger prints.
Imagekind wins on sizes & paper types available. Also their customer service impressed me, though I do not consider this a win over Deviantart, since I have never had the need to ask anything from them.
Well both prints arrived at my local post office on the same day and I rushed over to pick them up. I’ll save my first impressions until after the more clinical look at the scans. Both prints were scanned at 300dpi, and the image cropped to one section of the print that I believe gave good indication of detail and colour accuracy. A crop of the original image is also included.
Remember these are 300dpi scans, the imperfections you see are close to invisible with the naked eye.
The Deviant Art print is sharp and saturated. The colours are very smooth but as I have experienced with all Fuji Crystal Archive prints, they are not quite how I wanted them. I have found getting a print to look the way I want with the Fuji colour profile is difficult, this is most likely a deficiency on my part, and a greater knowledge of working with difficult colour profiles would probably make all the difference. Deviant Art wants you to upload the images with the SRGB colour profile, and this makes it even harder to get right.
The Imagekind print is far more noisy, and I can indeed see this noise with the naked eye. This is a noise I see with all ink jet prints on papers that don’t smooth the inks enough, and looking at the Imagekind media pack seems to reveal that this is at its worst with the paper I chose. That said the colours are correct, the image sharp, though not quite as sharp looking as the DeviantArt print.
Now back to the first impressions of the prints.
The DeviantArt print looks great. At first glance, it is contrasty and well saturated, the colours bright and shadows dark. It definitely has a certain wow factor. The feel of paper reminds one of your standard 1 hour print shop photo prints. Overall I was very pleased with the result; though the colours were obviously different from the digital file, the average viewer would not know this.
The Imagekind print came packaged in so many layers that it took me well over a minute to get it out. I thought I had been pleased with the DeviantArt print; but this was even better. The print had the advantage of being slightly larger, and also had a thin white border which seems to enhance the viewing. The colours were close perfect, and the image sharp. Though I could see the pattern of the ink jet printer if I looked really closely when taking in the image as a whole this was invisible. That Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl paper is something to behold, it looks & feels perfect, and managed to make the photo look more than just a photo.
The final result is a resounding victory to Imagekind, though if I had chosen a cheaper paper, this might have been closer. I obviously need to do some more learning with regard to colour profiles, and until that happens Imagekind will win every time. I upload an SRGB image, and the print I get is the same as what I see on screen.
Overall Deviant Art wins on cost, by quite a margin on small prints; with Imagekind beating them, often only narrowly, on every other aspect. I have no doubt that you would be pleased with prints from both these sites, and they are close enough that there is no truly better option.
