Photo Craft Imaging opened its doors in 1974 as Photo Craft Laboratories, a custom Black and White photo lab in Boulder, Colorado. The lab occupied 800 square feet and offered hand processing of black/white film, copy services and custom printing on primarily Agfa and Ilford non-RC papers. From the beginning the emphasis was on quality. By 1976 Photo Craft had doubled in size and added custom color type C printing. Over the next few years it double in size several more times adding E6 processing, slide/transparency duplication, C41 processing, Type R printing, large format print finishing and enhanced existing services. By the mid 1980′s Photo Craft needed a new home with more space, a better layout and “times were a changing”. So, in 1988 Photo Craft moved to an 8500 square foot facility where it started experimenting with something new, Digital Imaging.
Digital imaging had started creeping onto the scene in the mid 1980′s with the the first film recorders writing digital data, mostly graphs and drawings to 35mm slides, the birth of the Power Point presentation. Photo Craft installed its first digital recording devices in 1989. In 1992 Photo Craft became the first photo lab in Colorado to offer large format direct digital printing. The entrance price was high, around a quarter million dollars, it was slow and the quality was nowhere near what we were getting photographically. But, it was a “brave new world” and Photo Craft was on the forefront.
Over the next ten years we would see the most amazing evolution in film and print processes for photography ever in history. Computers, scanners, editing software and imaging devices became faster and the quality improved to the point where digital capture and printing not only caught up to traditional optical methods, but went way beyond. Photo Craft participated in every nuance of the evolution. By 1998, Photo Craft was drum scanning to optical resolutions of 8000 ppi, creating “digital original” transparency duplicates at Rez 80 using lasers and printing large format photographic prints with a Cymbolic Sciences LightJet, which also used lasers to write directly to the photographic paper. The improvements in digital imaging and digital work-flows were signally the end of traditional processes and optical print making.
By 2009, growth and the demand for enhanced print finishing services like acrylic mounting and custom framing, pushed Photo Craft into a larger new facility. Our new 12,500 square foot Solar Powered building redefines efficiency and lends itself to producing a more consistently high quality product for our clients as well as improving the quality of the working environment for our staff.
The beneficiary is you. You get the benefit of our 38 years in the print making business. You also get the benefit of working with a company that has been involved in digital imaging since the earliest days of digital imaging. Most print making companies today were not even in business when Photo Craft started producing work using digital processes. The difference is visual. Are you ready?
January 2012 Roy McCutchen, CEO Photo Craft Imaging
