Instant prints are finished the moment they develop. Everything I shoot on medium format and 35 mm goes through the darkroom first, and most weeks that means one long night under the red light.
Contact sheets before anything else
I print every roll as a contact sheet and mark the frames with a grease pencil. It is slower than scrolling through files, but seeing the whole roll at once tells me how a shoot really went, not just which frame is sharpest.
Then the keepers
Only the marked frames get printed full size, and a good print can take an hour of test strips. The rest of the selection is scanned for the online gallery, so clients get both.
The Safelight switch on this site is a small homage to that room. Turn it on and every print goes red until you hover over it, just like checking a sheet before the lights come back on.
