We have spent a long time now developing your film, scanning it, and handing the results back as files. Files are convenient. Files are also, if we are honest with each other, where photographs go to be scrolled past once and then forgotten in a folder called "SCANS FINAL v3".
So we have added prints. Two sizes, four finishes, ordered directly from the scans already sitting in your Loupe gallery. Here is how it works, and then, for those who enjoy this sort of thing, rather more detail about the machine doing the printing than is strictly necessary.
Ordering, start to finish
Open your gallery. Every developing and scanning order arrives with a Loupe link. That link is permanent (up to a year), so an order from eight months ago is still there, still full resolution, still yours.
Loupe gallery view showing a roll of scans
Select your frames. Tick the frames you want printed. You are selecting from the scans we have already produced, which means no uploading, no hunting through a hard drive, and no re-exporting a JPEG at the wrong colour space at eleven at night.
Frame selection with several images ticked
Choose size and finish. Both are set per frame rather than per order, so a single roll can come back as a mix if you want it to. What the four finishes actually do is covered further down. You can also apply the same size and finish to the whole order.
Size and finish selection
Decide how the frame sits on the paper. This is the part worth slowing down for. If your negative and your chosen print size are not the same shape, you get to choose what happens rather than having us decide for you. Print the full image and it sits complete on the sheet with white space on two edges, nothing lost, nothing trimmed. Or fill the sheet edge to edge, in which case something has to go. If you fill, you control the zoom and you drag the frame to position it, so the crop lands where you want it and not wherever an algorithm felt like putting it.
Fit and fill options with zoom and positioning controls
Add a border if you want one. A 5mm white border around the edge of the image, optional on every print and every size. It does the thing a border does: gives the image a bit of air, stops it fighting with whatever it is mounted against, and makes the print rather easier to handle without putting a thumb on the picture.
Border toggle
Add to basket and checkout. Prints from a single Loupe session (meaning you can select photos across all or your rolls and orders) are batched into one order, and the per print price drops as the quantity climbs.
The two sizes, and the arithmetic nobody enjoys
4x6 is a 3:2 print. A 35mm frame is 3:2. These are the same shape, so a full frame prints edge to edge with nothing lost and nothing to decide. If you shoot 35mm and you want the composition you took, this is the size.
6x8 is a 4:3 print, which a 35mm frame is not. Fill the sheet and roughly eleven percent of the long edge has to go. Print the full image instead and you keep every millimetre of the frame, with white space top and bottom. Neither is the wrong answer. A tightly composed street frame usually wants the full image. A landscape with room to spare usually takes the crop without complaint.
If you shoot 645, 6x8 is very nearly your native aspect ratio and it is the better of the two sizes for you. Square shooters get white space either way, though a 6x6 frame printed full and centred on a 6x8 sheet looks rather good, and the 5mm border on top of that looks better still.
Four finishes
Gloss is the highest sheen of the four. Deepest apparent blacks, most saturated colour, and the most reflections. Good for colour negative, good for anything with a strong tonal range, less good under a spotlight.
Lustre is the semi gloss middle ground, with a very fine pearl texture that scatters reflections without dulling the image. It is the standard professional portrait finish for a reason and it is the one we would hand to someone who had not told us what they wanted.
Matte removes the sheen entirely. Contrast reads slightly lower and blacks slightly lighter, because a matte surface cannot bounce light back at you the way a gloss one can. In exchange you can look at it from any angle in any room.
Fine matte is matte with a very subtle texture worked into the surface. On black and white in particular it does something quite specific to the way grain reads, adding a tactility that flat matte does not have. It is the one people order once out of curiosity and then keep ordering.
All four come off the same printer with the same dyes. The finish is decided at the final pass, which brings us neatly to the nerdy bit.
We are a dry lab, and here is what that means
A traditional wet lab exposes silver halide paper with lasers or LEDs and then runs it through RA-4 chemistry: developer, bleach fix, wash, dry. It is a genuinely lovely process and it is also a tank of chemistry that needs replenishing, monitoring and disposing of, with results that drift as the chemistry ages.
We print dye sublimation instead. No chemistry, no wet transport, no drift.
How it works. A thermal head passes over a dye ribbon carrying yellow, magenta and cyan panels in sequence. Heat turns the solid dye directly into a gas, skipping the liquid stage entirely, which is the sublimation part. That gas diffuses into a receiving layer on the paper and solidifies there. It is not sitting on top of the paper. It is in it.
Why this matters for how the print looks. The head modulates temperature to control how much dye transfers, which produces genuine continuous tone rather than a pattern of dots. Inkjet, however good, is still laying down a halftone or stochastic dot structure that a (physical) loupe will find. Dye sublimation has no dot structure to find. For film scans in particular this is the right answer, because grain is the texture you want to see and you would rather it were not competing with a dither pattern.
The fourth pass. After the three colour panels comes a clear overcoat, fused into the surface under heat. This is where the finish is set, and it is also a sealed protective layer: fingerprint resistant, water resistant, and a meaningful barrier against UV and airborne pollutants. It is the reason a dye sublimation print is dry and handleable the instant it leaves the machine, with nothing to outgas and no drying time to wait out.
And consistency. No chemistry to age means print one and print four hundred come out the same. It also means the print you order in March matches the print you order in November, which is the sort of thing you only notice when it goes wrong.
Prints are available now in every Loupe gallery, including old ones. If you have not sent us a roll yet, that is the missing step: we develop C-41 colour and black and white, scan at high resolution, deliver to Loupe, and now print from it too. Send us something and see what it looks like on paper.
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