If you are working in a *high end lab* or service bureau with a high-end Epson or Canon inkjet printer using eight or more pigmented inks, you have a device with a 16-bit compatible driver. If you are converting and adjusting a raw file in Lightroom, using a wide-gamut color space, you have a much greater range of tonal gradation than can be stored in an 8-bit, sRGB JPEG. A 16-bit printer driver can print many more subtle gradations than an 8-bit driver. It converts the photo from a wide gamut ICC color space directly to the color space profile for the exact paper, ink, and printer combination in use. The result is a print with much finer tonal gradation than you can see in a print made with an 8-bit driver, from an 8-bit JPEG.

Top ad agencies, art museums, and pro photographers with high end clients use this process. It preserves as much of the tonality as is possible to print on paper. If your business is to reproduce CocaCola Red, rather than Corvette Red, you need a workflow like this.

If you export an adjusted raw file as 16-bit TIFF, it will print exactly the same way as in the scenario I just mentioned. The TIFF contains the adjusted bitmap image in a file wrapper, along with assorted metadata. HOWEVER, you have limited yourself to the selection of tones stored in the TIFF. There is still more information in the raw file, that can be extracted and printed, or extracted and exported to a different TIFF.

What separates traditional photo labs from high end service bureaus is the technology and precision applied. Conventional photo labs like the one I spent half my life in will accept only 8-bit JPEG files in the sRGB color space, and print them to RGB devices on silver halide paper. Those devices have three color channels. The photo paper they use has a gamut about the same size as sRGB, only a little different. There are some colors in sRGB that the paper can't reproduce, and some colors the paper can reproduce that sRGB cannot contain.

When I ran the digital departments at Herff Jones Photography Division (now part of Lifetouch), we had 15 Noritsu mini-labs. We also used an Epson for prints up to 44x96 inches. The Epson had a MUCH wider color gamut than the Noritsus, so we had to "dumb it down" with simulation profiles to make it look like the Noritsus. Otherwise, if we had an order for large format prints and small format prints mixed together, the Epson prints would make the Noritsu prints look bad! And that was from 8-bit JPEGs. When we received a 16-bit TIFF in a wide-gamut color space, for a large Epson print and some Noritsu prints (12x18 and smaller), they would not match unless we converted the TIFF to an 8-bit sRGB JPEG to make both prints. But if we printed the entire order on the Epson, from the 16-bit TIFF, converting color spaces on the fly, it was very noticeably better than anything else we could deliver.

Nash Editions is a start. But Graham's service bureau is just one of the oldest and best... There are many who know how to do this, now. This workflow is used in pro commercial studios, corporate in-house communications/creative services shops, as well as labs.

However, MOST photo lab execs are way too short-sighted to understand the added value that archival inkjet printing provides. They get hung up on cost per square foot, which can be five times more than silver halide. They don't care about color gamut or 200-year life vs. 40-year life before fading...

The very best way is to learn to do it yourself. But that may take you away from the camera and (if you sell your work) sales opportunities.