Professional framing or DIY? What’s best for your art, photos and awards.

Any kind of art — from the Mona Lisa to your family snapshots — can look better in a nice frame.

To elevate, protect and display paintings, photos and other prizes, you’ll either need to find a good shop to do the work or buy supplies and DIY. Many local framing shops provide expert advice, take care of your precious items and don’t charge high prices. If you want to frame yourself, online businesses offer products and instructions, or you can buy supplies from an arts and crafts store and watch online instructional videos for an assist on putting everything together.

If someone else will do the work, you’ll want a skilled pro who offers sage advice. Staff at the best shops will spend time with you exploring framing options (single or double mat? Metal or wood? Plexiglass or real glass?) and eventually give you a fine-looking final product.

Until Nov. 5, Checkbook is offering free access to its ratings of area framing shops to the Minnesota Star Tribune readers via Checkbook.org/StarTribune/framing. Checkbook surveyed its own subscribers plus other randomly selected individuals. You’ll notice big shop-to-shop differences for customer satisfaction and prices.

You can hire a local shop to do your framing, ship your stuff to an internet-based outfit or do some or all the work yourself. DIY options are usually the cheapest. You can buy inexpensive frames at stores like Target, Pottery Barn and IKEA, and they often look pretty good.

“I do kid artwork walls for some of my clients, and cheaper frames like this are a great option,” says Allison Marvin, an art consultant whose firm, Sightline, helps people buy and mount art.

Make sure you use acid- and lignin-free mats that won’t damage artwork through time. Check on this sign of quality when buying from online outfits or when picking up an inexpensive premade frame. Most pro framers use nothing but acid-free materials.

If you have odd-sized art or want customized frames and mats, several websites allow you to enter measurements and shop from hundreds of frames. Plus, you can buy custom-cut mats, glass or plexiglass fronts and more. The store ships your products, and you assemble everything. In our experience, this is a relatively simple but not totally goof-proof transaction.

Precise measuring is crucial. Also, plexiglass panels from online vendors can have a lot of fuzz that’s a pain to remove, and positioning art onto precut mats is harrowingly tedious. If you’re using a mat, buy linen mounting tape ($10 to $15 at art stores or online) to affix art to the mat.

If you want a full-service frame-up, local stores or internet-based companies can help. The internet services (e.g. Framebridge.com, PictureFrames.com, SimplyFramed.com) ship you tubes or flat mailers so you can send your artwork to them. They then frame the item and mail it back. If you’ve got a digital photo or print, the process is simpler: Email it to the company, which then sizes it, prints it and sends you a framed version a few weeks later. Simply Framed, in particular, offers a wide range of suggestions tailored to specific sorts of art and artifacts, aka a groovy plexibox (also known as a shadowbox) for a textile, or a gilt wooden frame for a fancy oil painting.

Why stick with a local shop? It’s easier to discuss your project in person, plus shipping your prized 1991 REM poster or preschooler’s latest masterpiece means it might get lost (and that happens). Start by shopping around for a good price. You’ll find big differences from business to business.

Checkbook’s undercover shoppers asked a sampling of local picture framing shops as well as major online outlets for their prices to frame two different pieces. For the larger piece, prices from surveyed full-service local shops ranged from $201 to $599 or more. For the smaller piece, prices ranged from $90 to $448.

The web-based stores consistently offered low prices. FrameItEasy.com’s prices were lowest among the online shops, as its prices were $67 for the smaller piece and $111 for the larger one (though remember, the final assembly is on you).

Don’t assume big chain operations always charge lower prices than smaller outfits. For the two pieces Checkbook shopped, Print & Frame in Burnsville and Wholesale Art & Framing in Bloomington offered among the lowest prices in Checkbook’s survey.

Twin Cities Consumers’ Checkbook magazine and Checkbook.org is a nonprofit organization with a mission to help consumers get the best service and lowest prices. We are supported by consumers and take no money from the service providers we evaluate. You can access Checkbook’s ratings of local framing shops until Nov. 5 at Checkbook.org/StarTribune/framing.