Photo Craft Laboratories

3550 Arapahoe Avenue
Boulder, CO 80303
(303) 442-6410
(800) 441-3873
http://www.pcraft.com

HONING THEIR CRAFT

The Wild West wasn’t so wild when it came to good photo labs back in the early 1970s, says Roy McCutchen, owner of Boulder, Colorado-based Photo Craft Laboratories. In fact, things were downright dull. “The only place a photographer could go out here for service was in Denver, and if you weren’t there, you were out of luck,” McCutchen explains. “When we opened Photo Craft in 1974 as a black-and-white lab, the response was so big, we kept expanding to meet demand and haven’t looked back since.”

Today, Photo Craft is one of the West’s premium custom labs and digital imaging centers with a 12,000-square-foot shop and a staff of 40 offering a wide range of film, scanning and printing services. A certified Kodak Q-Lab and member of the Fuji Professional E-6 lab monitoring program, Photo Craft features high-end processing for E-6 slides and transparency films, C-41 color negative and black and white. Film duplication and copy services include 35mm and 70mm repro dupes; large-format, 4 x 5 and 8 x 10; 35mm digital slides; and LightJet 2080 large-format Res 80 digital film recording. The majority of photographic printing is done using gaseous and solid-state RGB lasers. Most negatives, slides and transparencies—color and black and white—are scanned and then printed on either a Frontier 370 or a LightJet 5000 digital printer.

While Photo Craft still offers traditional optical printing utilizing Type R, Type C and black-and-white processes, they have taken up less of the lab’s workload due to the superior results obtainable via digital methods. Photographers can submit digital files from their own scans and digital cameras rather than film for prints and enlargements. Photo Craft’s scanning services run the gamut from Aztek drum scans on the high end through “desktop publishing” and large-format flatbed scanning and high-volume scanning via the Frontier 370 or Kodak Photo CD. The lab also provides high-quality fine-art printing to heavy watercolor papers and prints to exotic materials like cloth, vinyl, canvas, foil and plastics.

“When we developed the 70mm repro dupe, which became the standard for the stock industry, it gave us national exposure, and our client base took off,” says McCutchen. “Photographers from across the U.S., Germany and Australia began contacting us, and the list just keeps growing.” In addition to stock photographers, advertising and commercial photographers like Tom Stewart, Dennis Welsh and James Balog have joined Photo Craft’s roster as well as corporate clients like Spyder Active Sports, Communication Arts, Wells Fargo Banks and Warren Miller Productions.

The lab was also recently hired to restore the original 1924 nitrate-based negatives from the ill-fated George Mallory and Andrew Irvine expedition to Mount Everest. “We’re very proud of what we do here and will continue to provide the kind of quality lab work and personal service professional photographers need,” McCutchen says.

— Joel Newman