Prints

We have spent a long time 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 added prints. Two sizes, four finishes, ordered directly from the scans already sitting in your Loupe gallery. No uploading, no hunting through a hard drive, no re-exporting a JPEG at the wrong colour space at eleven at night.

How it works

Open your gallery. Every development and scanning order arrives with a Loupe link, and that link stays live for a year. An order from eight months ago is still there, still full resolution, still yours.

Tick the frames you want. One hero shot, a handful of favourites, or the whole roll if every frame earned its place.

Choose size and finish per frame. Both are set individually rather than per order, so a single roll can come back as a mix if you want it to. You can also apply one size and finish across everything.

Decide how the frame sits on the paper. If your negative and your chosen print size are not the same shape, you 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. Or fill the sheet edge to edge, in which case you control the zoom and drag the frame to position it, so the crop lands where you want it rather than wherever an algorithm felt like putting it.

Add a border if you want one. A 5mm white border, optional on every print and every size. It gives the image a bit of air and lets you handle the print without putting a thumb on the picture.

Checkout. Prints from a single Loupe session are batched into one order, and you can select frames across all of your rolls. The more prints in the order, the less each one costs.

What it costs

Every finish costs the same. Gloss, lustre, matte and fine matte come off the same printer using the same dyes, so there is no reason to charge you differently for choosing the one you actually want.

Price per print — volume discounts applied automatically

The tier is worked out on the total number of prints in your order, not on each size or finish separately. Twelve 4×6 and twelve 6×8 is twenty four prints, so the whole order lands in the 24–47 tier. Mix sizes and finishes as freely as you like.

Prices include VAT. Postage is worked out separately at checkout, based on the size of the order and the delivery method you pick. The tier breaks sit just above the usual roll lengths on purpose, because a 24 exposure roll printed in full should not miss a discount by one frame.

The two sizes

4×6 is a 3:2 print, and a 35mm frame is 3:2. 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.

6×8 is 4:3, 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, 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 takes the crop without complaint. If you shoot 645, 6×8 is very nearly your native aspect ratio and it is the better of the two for you. Square shooters get white space either way, though a 6x6 frame printed full and centred on a 6×8 sheet looks rather good, and the 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, 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 subtle texture worked into the surface. On black and white in particular it does something 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.

We are a dry lab

A traditional wet lab exposes silver halide paper with lasers or LEDs and runs it through RA-4 chemistry. 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. 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, which diffuses into a receiving layer on the paper and solidifies there. The dye is not sitting on top of the paper, it is in it. The head modulates temperature to control how much transfers, which produces genuine continuous tone rather than a pattern of dots. Inkjet, however good, still lays down a halftone or stochastic dot structure that a physical loupe will find. Dye sublimation has no dot structure to find, which for film scans 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.

After the three colour panels comes a clear overcoat, fused into the surface under heat. That 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 why a dye sublimation print is dry and handleable the instant it leaves the machine. No chemistry to age also means print one and print four hundred come out the same, and the print you order in March matches the print you order in November.

Haven't sent us a roll yet?

That is the missing step. We develop C-41 colour and black and white in 35mm and 120, scan at high resolution, deliver to Loupe, and print from it. Send us something and see what it looks like on paper.