Printique Brand Guidelines: Adorama’s Brooklyn Photo Lab, Formerly AdoramaPix

A camera shop’s own photo lab.

Printique is the photo-printing arm of Adorama, the New York camera and video retailer. English Wikipedia says Adorama was founded in 1974 as a shop for cameras and photographic equipment, and that it later settled in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, where it still has a large store. Printique’s own pages describe it as “Printique, An Adorama Company,” and say it was founded as the in-house photo lab for Adorama.

The lab first traded under the parent’s name. English Wikipedia says that in 1997, the year Adorama registered its own web address for online sales, it also introduced a photo-printing service called AdoramaPix, which offered prints and hard-cover photo books made online and delivered to the customer’s home. Printique now says it has been printing, preserving and transforming photographs “for more than 20 years.”

The lab’s home is Brooklyn. English Wikipedia says that in 2014 AdoramaPix moved to a company-owned photo lab of more than 20,000 square feet in Brooklyn, and that the move added production capacity, more options for custom-cover books and a same-day shipping option for some orders. Printique’s about page today names Brooklyn as the place where it offers professional consultations in person, alongside Adorama’s Manhattan store; Adorama itself also runs warehouses, including one in New Jersey that English Wikipedia dates to 2005.

The change of name came in 2019, when, English Wikipedia says, AdoramaPix was rebranded as Printique. The photography site SLR Lounge, reviewing the service on 7 September 2022, introduced it the same way: formerly AdoramaPix, the printing arm of Adorama, first set up as the retailer’s in-house lab.

Silver-halide prints, lay-flat books and albums.

Printique builds its pitch around one printing method. Its about page says it is “one of the few photography labs” to use silver-halide printing for prints and books, in which light-sensitive paper is exposed and the image is formed with silver-based chemistry, rather than with ink. The company sets this method out as the reason for its emphasis on sharpness, colour and skin tones.

The book range is wide and carefully named. The site splits it into Photo Books, Layflat Albums and Classic Books. The photo books include lay-flat, hard-cover, leather, fabric and soft-cover versions, plus a quick-build option called Easy Books. The albums are lay-flat throughout, with covers in fabric, acrylic, leather, hard cover or metal. Tom’s Guide, in a review updated on 1 November 2025, noted that even the default Printique photo book has lay-flat pages, and that a new Classic Hardcover line, offered in portrait, square and landscape shapes with Luster, Vellum, Matte and Magazine paper finishes, does not lie flat. Leather covers come in “vegan” and “genuine” versions, the review said, as SLR Lounge also noted in 2022.

Wall decor and prints form the second half of the catalogue: metal, stretched-cotton, acrylic and wood prints, glass and fine-art giclée prints, framed prints and photo tiles, with standard, poster and fine-art paper prints. Calendars and cards complete the consumer side. On the professional side, the site lists a Pro Membership, gallery stores and a trade programme, and SLR Lounge described sample kits that photographers can show to clients, along with a quality guarantee the company calls the “Printique Promise.”

The design software is where reviewers have been more mixed. Tom’s Guide praised the print quality, the thick pages and the colour and contrast of portraits, but found the software slow and at times confusing, while noting the level of control it gives, down to setting image sizes to hundredths of an inch, with rulers, grids and a floating toolbar. It also counted 86 photo-book templates and noted a live chat helper for design questions.

How photo-book services present themselves.

Photo-book and photo-printing services sell something the customer has already made: the pictures. Their own sites therefore tend to lead with the customer’s photographs rather than with the company. Home pages show open books, framed prints and wall pieces in ordinary rooms, often styled around an occasion such as a wedding, a new baby, a holiday or the end of a year, and the product sits in the frame as a finished keepsake.

The making itself is shown through the tools. Most of these companies offer an online editor and a phone app, and they describe both in plain, step-by-step language: upload, choose a size and cover, arrange the pages, order. Automatic layouts, themes and templates are presented as time-savers, while desktop editors with grids, rulers and finer controls are offered to people who want to place every picture themselves.

Product naming follows the physical object. Ranges are sorted by format, page count, binding and cover — soft cover, hard cover, fabric, leather, lay-flat — and by paper finish, with words such as matte, lustre or gloss doing most of the work. Wall pieces are named by their material, from stretched cotton and acrylic to metal, wood and framed prints, so the label tells the buyer what will hang on the wall.

Behind the consumer brands sit the labs and the owners. Corporate pages explain which group a label belongs to, where its printing sites are and how its brands divide up the countries they serve, while lab-led services describe their printing methods and papers in more detail. For a designer, the useful lessons are in that split: a warm, occasion-led consumer voice on top, and a precise, material-led vocabulary underneath.

A lab name that keeps its parent in view.

The Printique name replaced a label that described the business rather plainly: AdoramaPix told customers it was Adorama’s picture service. The full trading line, “Printique, An Adorama Company,” keeps the parent in view. The Instagram account carries the same link in its handle, and the site’s menus are written in the language of print — finishes, cover materials, print sizes by ratio and sample packs — rather than in the language of gifts alone.

That language suits a lab whose customers include working photographers as well as families. SLR Lounge reviewed Printique in 2022 for wedding and portrait photographers looking for a print partner, and highlighted its leather, hard-cover and metal-cover albums with lay-flat pages. Tom’s Guide, writing for general buyers, focused on photo books, calendars and cards, and the review carries its Editor’s Choice label. The site’s account sign-up asks new users whether they are a professional photographer, a hobbyist, an artist selling work, a designer or an interior designer, among other choices.

The company also keeps its customer service close to the lab. Its about page says the service team can be reached by phone during business hours, with “no bots, no automated responses,” and that consultations are offered in person at its Brooklyn offices. The same page describes a quality check on every order before it ships.

For a design guide, Printique shows how a photo service can lead with its printing method and materials, and name its ranges by cover, binding and paper rather than by occasion. It sits beside Mpix, another American photo lab, and Artifact Uprising, the Denver photo-book company. For this guide we use ink blue, brownstone and lustre white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Printique’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.