FAQ: DigiLabs

About Us > FAQ

Yes. Download the Mac or Windows version from our site.

How much does the software cost?

DigiLabs software is free.

What can I do with the software?

Professional photographers can use DigiLabs software to:

Instantly upload studio branded, e-commerce enabled web galleries.
Create, customize & order custom photo products
Manage, organize and edit an entire shoot at once. Features includes auto rotate, batch sorting, renaming, categorizing, correction (color, density and gamma), filters, cropping and much more

About Our Guarantee

Do you have a satisfaction guarantee on your photo products?: Yes, we do! Read all about our DigiLabs Pro Guarantee

About Web Galleries

What is it?

DigiLabs offers online web galleries that allow you to host your images online for your customers to proof and order. We offer flexible plans that you can customize to help find the best fit for your business. We can take care of the credit card charging or you can. We can take care of the fulfillment or you can. Learn more about our web galleries .

How much does it cost?

We offer a wide array of options including

Plans with flat monthly fees, monthly fees with commissions or annual plans with no monthly fees and a commission.
DigiLabs can take care of all credit card processing or you can use your own e-commerce account. If we do the credit card charging your account will have a commission rate associated with it.
DigiLabs can fulfill your orders or you can manually fulfill some or all of your orders through a different lab. The only cost to you is the cost of the product.

Learn more about our web galleries

How much does it cost?

We offer a wide array of options including:

Plans with flat monthly fees, montly fees with commissions or annual plans with no montly fees and a commission.
DigiLabs Pro can take care of all credit card processing or you can use your own e-commerce account. If we do the credit card charging your account will have a commission rate associated with it.
DigiLabs Pro can fulfill your orders or you can manually fulfill some or all of your orders through a different lab. The only cost to you is the cost of the product.

How many images can be stored per event?

There is no limit to how many images can be uploaded per event or how many galleries you can upload on your account. Your account does have an image limit that varies based on your plan. However, you can change your account’s plan to accommodate your business’ needs at any time. You can also go above your image quota for a nominal fee. Galleries that are inactive do not count against your images quota.

How long will my images stay online?

It is completely up to you. In your account administration area, you can set automatic expiration dates for your galleries (1 day to 10 years).

What size should my images be?

DigiLabs Pro software automatically resizes images for optimal web viewing (72 DPI) for product printing so we recommend working with a full resolution JPEG file in sRGB color space.

Can users order using their credit card?

Yes. You decide who handles the credit card charging. If you are handling the merchant account then this is up to you. If DigiLabs Pro is handling the payment then your customers can pay using Visa, Mastercard or American Express.

Can users purchase prints from their gallery? Who prints these orders? Can I have a different lab print my orders?

You can decide who handles the print fulfillment. DigiLabs can automatically print and drop ship online orders to your customers. You just need to sit back, relax and do what you love. Or you can use any lab of your choice.

How do users order prints and how do I receive orders?

You can create a pricelist in your account administration which will appear in your live galleries. Once your pricing is created and your gallery is uploaded, your clients can go online and place their order through your gallery. When the order has been placed, you will receive an e-mail from DigiLabs Pro giving you the details of the order.
You can also log in to our web based order management system to view your orders (in real time) organized by gallery and date. You can see all of your order information, including a thumbnail image of print orders, as well as your own billing/accounting history with DigiLabs Pro.

Can people copy my images from the web?

Images on the web are uploaded at low resolution through our software. We only upload a 72 dpi file, making quality printing impossbile. We also have the maximum security available to discourage users from copying images from the web including: blocking right-click save function for Windows users, making images invisible when trying to print from the browser and more. You can also watermark images quickly within our software for further protection.

How do I upload to the Web?

Our downloadable software will enable you to quickly and easily upload your galleries (available for Mac and Windows). for a free 30-day trial and see what makes DigiLabs Pro different. Have more questions? We also offer email support and free phone support (866-344-4522). We encourage you to call us - we are happy to help walk you through the upload process.

How can DigiLabs Pro help me promote my web galleries to increase sales?

Our galleries have tools to market your galleries and your business. Options include:

Collect email addresses (optional feature) before allowing someone to view a gallery.
Allow your customers to Facebook, Twitter and blog about their gallery... all with your own studio’s branding.
Facebook, Twitter and blog about your gallery uploads yourself using your account administration tools.
Enable an optional feature to allow viewers to email images and the gallery log-in access to friends.
Use the email marketing tool to import a list of the visitors from your galleries to your email. DigiLabs Pro will never contact your customers. We are there to help.
We have event cards and promotional cards you can make and purchase to promote your business. These cards are perfect as business cards, event cards or promotional materials that you can hand out at events and meetings.

Why does DigiLabs Pro cost significantly less than comparative offerings?

Simply stated, we are more efficient and leverage our software expertise (it’s great to be located in Silicon Valley) with many years of experience in software and web application development. We also optimize the print processing and printing to bring empowering solutions for professional photographers. It comes down to user-friendly software, services and solutions that make professional photographers’ life a little easier.

About Photographic Proofs and Prints

Do you offer color and density corrections?: We offer density and color corrections for our photographic prints. Our photo prints are color corrected by a trained lab technician to ensure every order is printed to perfection.
How do I do color profiling with DigiLabs?: DigiLabs software reads the ICC profiles of your images. If your monitor has recently been calibrated, what you see on your monitor is what is printed through DigiLabs. We calibrate to SRGB and as stated above, we color correct all photographic prints.
How do I do order lab prints?: From the software you can order photographic prints by selecting the ‘Prints’ tab on the left hand side. You can order photographic proofs by selecting the ‘Proofs’ tab on the left hand side. Our software automatically resizes images to 300 DPI to maximize upload speed while ensuring optimal resolution for excellent print quality. The built-in FTP process in our software ensures that you can upload print orders from your computer directly to our servers.
What is the turnaround time?: Photographic prints and proofs have a turnaround of 2-3 business days. Metallic prints and mounting services have a turnaround of one business week. See shipping details for ship time.
What kind of digital retouching services do you offer and at what prices?: We charge $35 per hour for digital retouching or $10 per person. Sloppy borders, custom cropping and corrections are provided at no extra charge.

About Coffee Table Books

What is a coffee table book?: Coffee table books are hardcover press printed books. They have earned the name ‘coffee table book’ because they resemble a published book you purchase at book stores, but they are also known as ‘photo books’.
What type of paper is used in DigiLab Pro’s books?": We print our Portola and Fillmore books on 100# text weight paper. The Ashbury books are printed on on 110# cover weight paper, which is double the thickness of text weight stock.
How do I create, design and order a coffee table book?: A coffee table book can be created using the ‘Photo books’ tab in the DigiLabs Pro software. A fastrack wizard that will predesign your book for you will then appear. You also have the option of designing a blank book by pressing ‘Start empty book’. When your project is complete, simply select ‘Send to DigiLabs Pro’, validate that everything is correct, and then proceed with the checkout.
How many sheets of printed paper does a 20-side coffee table book have?: Ten. Remember, a page is a single side of the sheet of paper bound in the book. Pages are also known as ‘sides’. A twenty-page book will only have ten sheets of printed paper since each side of the paper is a page.

About Gallery Wraps

What is a gallery wrap?: A gallery wrap is a canvas print in which the image is partially wrapped about a frame to create a finished presentation that can be directly hung on the wall without the need of a frame.

About Cards

Are your cards branded?: Our cards have only the design that you put on the card. No DigiLabs branding is evident on any of our products.
Can I use an image?: All surfaces of the card can be fully customized with text, images, or any combination of both. You can use multiple images per card surface.

Information About Images

What is dpi, image size, and why is it important?

When sending a job to be printed, whether at home or at a professional printer, it is important to remember that the quality of the printed image will always be only as good as the quality of the images used in the creation process. Generally, a computer monitor will present an image using a screen resolution of approximately 72-96 dots-per-inch (dpi). That is, any inch on the screen is divided into 72 dots vertically and 72 dots horizontally, and those dots, also known as Pixels, generate the presentation for this inch on the screen. Printing on paper, however, requires a higher dots-per-inch resolution to achieve photo quality output. The quality will depend on the image resolution as well as an array of other factors, such as the color range that can be applied to a dot by the printer, the printer technology (Inkjet, Toner, Ink), and the paper quality. Typically the DPI of a printable image should be at least 150 (DPI), 200 DPI will be better, and a 300 DPI image will insure the high quality of the printed output.

How do I figure out the dpi of the image?

The image size is measured in pixels. The quality of the printed output is measured in dots-per-inch. For simplicity, lets treat a pixel as a dot. In other words, the quality of the printed output will be measured by the number of pixels/dots we can print per inch. The more dots the printer can access, the higher the quality of the picture. So if an image is 600 pixels per side, and it is printed at 600 dots-per-inch (DPI), it will print out as an image 1 inch wide and high. If we would like to enlarge that image to be 2 inches the DPI will drop to 300, and if the image will be enlarged to 6 inch the DPI will drop to 100. If you divide the number of pixels of an image by the DPI you seek the printable image to be (typically 150-300) the result will be the appropriate size of that image. Pixels / DPI= Size of image (in Inches).
For example: If image size is 1,280 x 1,024 pixels and you want to the printed output to be of 200 DPI quality, divide the pixels (1,280 x 1,024) by the DPI you seek (200). That will result in a 6.40 x 5.12 inch image with 200 DPI quality on the printed output, or 4.27 x 3.41 inch 300 DPI image (1,280:300=4.27 inch. 1,024:300=3.41 inch) To calculate the image print DPI, you divide the image size in pixels with the image size in inch (as will appear on paper) . DPI = Pixels / Size of image (in Inches) For example, a 640 x 480 pixel image displayed as an 8 7/8 x 6 2/3 inch image has a 72 dpi resolution. When printed at this size, this image will be low quality, as it has a 72 dots-per-inch resolution. If, on the other hand, this image were used to print a 2.1 x 1.6 inch image (representing a 300 dots-per-inch resolution), its quality would be excellent. In our DigiLabs Pro Software you will be warned if the dpi of one of your images is below the recommended resolution.

What is the "right" dpi?

You can get photo quality results when using as few as 150-200 dots-per-inch (dpi) images. The basic rule to keep in mind is that in order to maintain image quality, the number of pixels in the image bitmap file must increase as the size of the printed picture increases. Otherwise, individual pixels will become larger in the print and the picture will get a jagged and grainy texture. Our DigiLabs Pro Software will warn you if the dpi of one of your images is below the recommended resolution.

What are the suggested guidelines for image quality?

Below are a few rules of thumb to use when using images for print:

Start with the largest images you can get out of your digital camera or scanner.
The original image as viewed on screen in 72 dpi should be 2 to 4 times bigger than its size on paper.
Try to maintain a resolution of not less than 150 dots-per-inch for the image. The following table will sum the common image sizes and their recommended printed size:

Digital Camera Image Size		Good Quality (150 DPI)		Better (200 DPI)		Best Quality (300 DPI)
(Pixels)		(Inch)
Width	Height	Width	Height	Width	Height	Width	Height
1,280	1,024	8.53	6.83	6.40	5.12	4.27	3.41
1,600	1,200	10.67	8.00	8.00	6.00	5.33	4.00
2,260	1,440	15.07	9.60	11.30	7.20	7.53	4.80
2,560	1,920	17.07	12.80	12.80	9.60	8.53	6.40
3,072	2,048	20.48	13.65	15.36	10.24	10.24	6.83

What are the drawbacks of too much dpi?

For printing, more dpi is better. However, too much information will require more memory space and more time to print, as well as a larger output file that will take much longer to upload. On the other hand, in most cases, the difference in quality between a 200 dpi image and 400 dpi image will not be noticeable to the human eye.

What is image compression and why should I care about it?

Images tend to be quite large in size. For example, a 4" x 6" image in a 300 DPI and 24 bit color will be more than 6 MB in size. This requires large storage space and is very slow to transmit on the network. JPEG is a compression technique designed for compressing images of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic artwork, and similar material. JPEG is "lossy," meaning that the decompressed image is not quite the same as the one with which you started. JPEG is designed to exploit known limitations of the human eye, notably the fact that small color changes are perceived less accurately than small changes in brightness. Most changes in the image are invisible to the eye. JPEG can achieve a 20:1 compression ratio without any visible loss, and up to 50:1 ratio with small to moderate defects. That is, the above 6 MB image can be compressed to a 300 KB image with no visible change to the image. Keep in mind that in most cases, you can achieve great compression ratio without any visible differences to the image. In summation, if you are using reasonable quality images and reasonable compression, your images are expected to be of high quality when printed. If the images you start with are either of low quality or too compressed, the final printed results will be as good (or bad) as the images you used. However, keep in mind that too much is not always better. A 4" x 6" 300 DPI non-compressed image and a 200 DPI JPEG compressed image will probably produce similar results. However, transferring it to print over the network using a 56KBps modem will take approximately 18 minutes with a high DPI image that is non-compressed as opposed to 25 seconds of a moderate DPI image that is slightly compressed.

FAQ

About DigiLabs Software

About Our Guarantee

About Web Galleries

About Photographic Proofs and Prints

About Coffee Table Books

About Gallery Wraps

About Cards

Information About Images

About DigiLabs Software

About Our Guarantee

About Web Galleries

About Photographic Proofs and Prints

About Coffee Table Books

About Gallery Wraps

About Cards

Information About Images

Web Galleries

Flush Mount Albums

Cards

Coffee Table Books

Other Products

About DigiLabs