Milwaukee area photo labs

[opus]

I notice that quite a few people here are from Southeastern Wisconsin, so I was wondering if anyone knows of a good lab in the Milwaukee area that does a great job with color, and can follow my cropping instructions, etc. and has a "fairly quick" turnaround.

Hopefully not too expensive, either, LOL! But I guess I'm willing to pay for quality.


I need to take in some 35mm negs and have them either made into slides, in which case I'd need to give them cropping instructions, or made into prints, and I'm going to be very fussy about color.

ALL of the labs that I know of around me are geared more toward the one-hour business, and where they do custom work, they send it out. I want to talk WITH THE PERSON who is doing my work.

Thanks in advance!
~Kelly

[another view]

I know a great place in Rockford - where I live - but their turnaround might not be very quick in the middle of summer. They do a lot of work for portrait and wedding photographers and it's their busy season. They also don't do anything with slide processing - but I'm not sure about negatives to slides. Mainly, they work with color neg but are very good with b&w too. Not cheap either for custom work, but worth what they charge.

Photo Emporium 815 877 9390 Only open M-F, BTW.

[adina]

Mike Crivello's is supposed to be very good. They do a lot of pro/wedding work. There's a location in Brookfield, Whitefish Bay, and I think two others. The one in Brookfield is on Bluemound Road, and there is another on Capitol Drive, I think in Shorewood.

The Camera Case in Hartford was very good, but they shut down their photo lab due to low profit.

adina

[opus]

adina, yeah, I'm sad about the Camera Case because they were close, but to tell you the truth, I was a little disappointed in their processing.

When I was in London, I didn't want to bring my film back through xray, so I got about 15 rolls developed at Snappy Snaps over there. I WAS THRILLED!!!! Blown away. But there was one roll I shot over there that I had to bring back (since I was snapping pix up to the hour I left for the airport), and I had that roll developed at Camera Case. Compared to the other rolls, it was grey.

Laurel's Camera in West Bend sends their stuff out, and I wasn't impressed with the 8x10s I got back from them. Portraits Today, also in West Bend, has been my best lab so far. But they're limited in what they can do on site.

Someone else mentioned Crivello's today. I know where the Brookfield store is, so I'll have to get down there on Monday.

[adina]

I really liked the Camera Case, never had a problem. Although I was in there so much the owner knew who I was.

I tried Portraits Today also, that's who Camera Case referred everyone too, if they didn't want to use *mart, on my first order they gave my prints to a church with a similar name, and then said "oh, I'm sure they'll bring them back". Have never gone back.

adina

[Chunk]

I really liked the Camera Case, never had a problem. Although I was in there so much the owner knew who I was.

I tried Portraits Today also, that's who Camera Case referred everyone too, if they didn't want to use *mart, on my first order they gave my prints to a church with a similar name, and then said "oh, I'm sure they'll bring them back". Have never gone back.

adina

Is your last name Episcopal?

[adina]

Is your last name Episcopal?

Yup. I go by Epi for short.

[opus]

Mike Crivello's is supposed to be very good. They do a lot of pro/wedding work. There's a location in Brookfield, Whitefish Bay, and I think two others. The one in Brookfield is on Bluemound Road, and there is another on Capitol Drive, I think in Shorewood.

The Camera Case in Hartford was very good, but they shut down their photo lab due to low profit.

adina

I have to say I'm very disappointed with Mike Crivello's. I had asked them on the phone if they were up to my standards, and they assured me they were, that their lab staff in Brookfield was "actually very good", so I drove all the way down there on Sunday (open on Sunday, that's a plus) to get a head start.

First of all, they had a very "tired" demeanor, all of them. Like they were tired of caring anymore.

I told the guy that these were very important prints, I was entering them in a contest, and I wanted the best of everything, best paper, etc. He said, "ok" but didn't mark anything down.

So I pulled out my previous 6x8 prints and told him I had specific cropping instructions for three of them. He paused for a bit to find out if their copier could make copies of my prints, but came back and told me that their copier would ruin my prints because they were too big. Apparently their copier rolls the prints through?? And he didn't want to keep the copies of my prints. OK, well, then I'd have to carefully describe my crops. I didn't like this but it's all that was offered to me.

I told him I wanted custom sizes but he said, no, they can't do that, I'd have to pick 5x7 or 8x10. And since my original prints were an odd size, I had to crop all of the photos.

SIGH! OK, fine, then do you have a proportion tool I can use to place my crops within 8x10 size? No. Just have to guess, and ask the lab techs to use their judgement. But I was assured the lab technicians would use good judgement.

I repeated that I wanted their best paper, but again, he just nodded and gave me no options to choose from.


So I proceeded to give detailed cropping instructions, although they weren't that hard. "Crop the left side up to the front of the car to remove the person" I said. He wrote down, "crop to front of first car."

I told him I needed the prints as soon as reasonable, and he told me they'd be ready on Tuesday. Call first, he said.

So on Tuesday I called, around noon. "Are my prints ready?" I asked. "Hold on, let me look." (came back) "No ma'am, they're not here." "Well, are they in the lab?" "Nope. I don't know where they are." "Umm, are you sure they're not there?" "No ma'am, I can't find them, sorry." (he's about to hang up.) "Umm, excuse me, but I sort of put a rush on them, and they told me to call on Tuesday to see if they were ready..."

"When did you bring them in?"

"Sunday."

"Hold on, let me look again." (he goes away for awhile again, then comes back.) "Yes ma'am, they're here. They were in the lab."

So I hopped in my car as soon as I could and went down to get them.

The photo where I asked to crop out the person, was cropped on the WRONG side.

The rest of the photos were left uncropped, with the instructions "customer needs to trim". I was OK with that, better that than to get the wrong cropping.

And the prints were on their regular, normal glossy paper. Yuck! They all looked yellow. The colors were dark and I was VERY unhappy.


So then I ran them down to Portraits Today. I asked for Pro paper and told them to just print them full frame, 8x12. (They had a proportional cropping tool, but it only worked on prints smaller than 4x6.)

They came back beautiful! I cut them all down to 8x10, matted and captioned them, and sent them out.

Portraits Today has gotten a lot better in the past couple years, IMO.

[Jeff82]

I've had really good luck with Mike Crivello's, but I stick with Kodak film and developing. Personally, I feel that Crivello's did a better job than Helix, but Helix is gone now anyway.

Have you tried using Kodak's new Ultra Color (UC) 100 film? That, along with their new developing process is really, really great.

--Jeff

[adina]

That they put you thru such a hassle. My dad used to go to the one on Capitol, of course that was 20 year ago....

Glad Portraits Today worked for you, and they are much closer.

Are you film or digital? There's a few online labs that do a great job, but then of course, you loose the person to person contact. Although it seems in some cases that doesn't matter anyway

I hate lousy customer service...

adina

[opus]

My older stuff is film. And I'm thinking I'm going to go back to film for some of my travel stuff.