Saving Money At The LightRoom

2263 Fifth St. Berkeley, CA 94710     (510) 649-8111   rob@lightrumors.com See Contact Us link for map

Hours currently are 10-3 weekdays.

Here are several ways to save money printing at The LightRoom. There are 30-50% discounts for multiple prints of any image, as detailed on our Prices page. The larger the print, the less cost per square foot, too.

A second way, for customers savvy in the ways of Photoshop and similar programs, is to gang your images onto a larger page. If you submit four different files for 8.5”x11” pigment prints, for example, they will be priced at the single print price of $25 each. Gang them up on a 17”x22” page and submit that one file, and the price for all four prints drops to $60! What you will need to do is flatten any layers, size or crop each image to the desired measurement, then, using the Canvas Size command in Photoshop, add a border, if needed, to each image. Then, select the entire canvas (Cmd or Ctrl A) and from the Edit menu, drop down to Stroke and add a one pixel stroke, along the center of the section, of a medium grey. This will now put a trim line around your bordered image, so we can cut it down for you. Then create a new page in the same color space, bit depth and resolution as the individual images. Drag each of your four images into it, align the edges so we can make straight cuts with the paper cutter, and flatten the page. If you need assistance the first time you try all this, call me and I’ll talk you through the steps. This will save you money on prints up to our full sheet size of 34”x44”. There is no cost savings from ganging images up on larger pages.

The third way to realize savings is from the specials we offer through our email newsletter or Twitter feed, which you can sign up for through the links on these pages. These will usually be discounts on particular papers, which is my way of encouraging you to try some of the different ones we stock. This might be on new papers or perhaps one older ones we’re closing out. Discounts on film scanning also are occasionally offered.

Another way to realize savings over the long term is what I call our Server Storage option. Most of the work we print for clients is never, or seldom, re-printed, so we don’t keep a printer-ready version of  every file we print. If we make a Master file from film we scan or a raw digital image we prepare, we save that Master file, but not a sized, sharpened and bordered version for printing. If you call up later to order another print, we open the Master and create the printing version, and you pay the base price determined by the print size.

With our server storage option, we create the printable file one time, charging you the base price only that one time. Then, the file goes into your own folder on our server and at anytime you need another print, it will always be at the second print price of 30% off, even when only ordering a single print, as long as nothing else has changed. If you need to change anything-size, exposure, etc. we make another printer file, you pay the base print price for that, and then it goes into the folder for the discount price next time. This also applies to any printer ready files you submit to us. The cost of this folder is $100 and it holds up to 5 gigabytes of files-no one has come close to filling theirs yet. You can fill it with different images or different versions or sizes of the same images, and afterwards, you’ll save at least 30% on your orders.