Profile

The Idolo lab was started in 1982 by George Marinos for the analog processing of black-and-white film and prints, with strict quality goals, and since 2005 it has continued while also offering high-specification digital services.

The lab is aimed mainly at professionals, but also at the demanding amateur who considers it essential to see their work technically flawless and, beyond that, aesthetically balanced.

Our philosophy

Our move to digital processing was a slow one, because we had many reservations about the final product. We mean the print: the printers of the time used water-based inks, and their combination with the few papers available was not at all convincing. So we repeatedly postponed the decision, until Epson's pigment technology appeared, first with its own papers and later with Hahnemühle papers. That finally solved the problems of fine art inkjet.

For us, the digital process only made sense if the result on paper was equal to the quality we expected. Without a sound final product, the rest of the journey, from scanning to editing, had no reason to exist.

Deep knowledge of the analog process naturally carries over, in the best possible way, to digital work, starting with the scanner settings when digitizing film and going on to the basic editing of the files. Our tools are Lightroom and Photoshop. In recent years this software has added individual tools with tremendous capabilities and, in our opinion, at least on a purely technical level, it now gives us better control than we can get in the darkroom.

It is up to us whether we also want to approach the aesthetic result. Here, though, a few things should be noted: if our source is black-and-white or color film, then with great care we can get a very good result, almost identical to analog. But if our source is a digital camera, things are completely different, because these are different approaches, and comparisons there are a mistake. We simply choose the approach that best covers our specific needs.