Entrepreneurs / Small Business  March 4, 2016

Boulder’s Photo Craft Imaging shoots for the perfect print

BOULDER — The perfect photograph is hard to come by. Impossible, even.

There are certainly some candidates, such as Walter Iooss’ shot of Muhammad Ali triumphantly pumping his fist over the fallen Sonny Liston, or the image of an unidentified man staring down a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square.

But photographers are artists, and good luck getting them to say that their work is perfect.

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Roy McCutchen isn’t chasing the perfect photo, nor does he consider himself an artist. He enjoyed photography as a child, even worked as a photographer in the early 1970s, but it never captured his heart the way that processing and printing those images has. To hear him tell it, creating the perfect print has been his lifelong obsession. Rather unlike the perfect photo, the perfect print is eminently achievable.

“I’m not afraid to reject my own work if it’s less than what I know it can be,” McCutchen said. “Making the perfect print, from a technical standpoint, is not that difficult. It’s a craft, not an art. You get your 10,000 hours in. The people capturing the images are the artists. Though I have to say, without humility, we add some magic that takes what might be a decent image into the realm of spectacular.”

That’s been the mission of McCutchen and his company, Photo Craft Imaging, for more than 40 years. McCutchen founded Photo Craft in the early 1970s as Poster Portraits and Blowups, and it became Photo Craft in 1975. A year later, Photo Craft had doubled in size and added new printing techniques, including large-format printing.

Things changed for McCutchen and Photo Craft in the late 1980s, though, when it began to experiment with digital imaging. In 1988, it moved into a new facility that was capable of housing digital printing machines, and installed its first ones in 1989.

“It was horribly painful, but we were convinced that it was necessary to be on the leading edge, sometimes called the bleeding edge, of imaging technology,” McCutchen said. “We were already there when our competitors awoke to the new world. We were able to attract new clients because we were able to offer services, turnaround times and products not available from our competitors.”

By 1992, Photo Craft had the first large-format digital printer in Colorado. It cost $250,000, took a bank of computers to run, sat in a room that with strict temperature and humidity regulations and could only produce a mediocre print. But it made them big and it made them fast, and it was better to be the only game in town with one than to not have one at all.

“I thought it was worth it,” McCutchen said. “There were many that thought I was nuts; $250,000 was a large chopping block for a small custom photo lab in Boulder, Colo.”

The photo printing industry, like many other industries, saw exponential growth in its technology and innovation over the next decade and more. Digital printing overtook traditional methods in ease of use and quality of printing. Photo Craft tried to stay in front of these advances, adding new technology such as the LightJet printer, which was one of the first printers that could create a digital image on par with film.

“Ultimately, when the industry evolved to a filmless business, we were already there with printing processes to support our transition to new products and services,” McCutchen said.

The printing industry also made leaps forward in its environmental friendliness. Printing requires far less water, natural gas and electricity than it did even 15 years ago, and the rise of digital printing has reduced the use of developing chemicals. Photo Craft, for its part, has made even more of an effort; in 2010 it installed 190 solar panels on its roof that generate 46 kilowatts of electricity.

Photo Craft’s website houses a document that espouses its commitment to environmental stewardship. It lays out efforts such as paperless billing, fluorescent lighting, computer recycling, incentivizing employees to bus or bike to work and a preference for dealing with other companies that have made a similar commitment to the environment.

Going green, McCutchen said, is a “never-ending process.” There’s always something more that can be done, and, unlike printing, you can’t put in 10,000 hours of practice and perfect it. But if you’re McCutchen, you try, and you get as close as you can.

BOULDER — The perfect photograph is hard to come by. Impossible, even.

There are certainly some candidates, such as Walter Iooss’ shot of Muhammad Ali triumphantly pumping his fist over the fallen Sonny Liston, or the image of an unidentified man staring down a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square.

But photographers are artists, and good luck getting them to say that their work is perfect.

Roy McCutchen isn’t chasing the perfect photo, nor does he consider himself an artist. He enjoyed photography as a child, even worked as a photographer in the early 1970s,…

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