Simple Printing? - Printing Simplified?

Printing from an inkjet printer should be trivially simple. However, anybody who has tried it will tell you that once you get past printing an A4 Word page in draft, things can get hot very quickly. By the time you get to printing a goofy sized image on a roll fed printer, onto a goofy-sized paper stock, with a bespoke profile you are faced with up to 28 mouse clicks. During that rampant rodent clicking, one false move can result in wasted media.

Even when you collapse back and watch the "printing" bar chugging along you may still not be out of the water - it is only when you see the whole of the white border at the back end of your image that you can afford a high five. Thankfully there are a number of options to assist you in your quest and they form the main part of this feature. However first we must digress to describe a problem that has been plaguing us for some time. A small group of Epson 7600 owners have been collaborating and swapping notes for some time in regard to some printing issues, particularly on large images or large contact sheets. The symptoms are the failure to print the whole image or in extreme cases a blue screen crash of the system. Here is what we have identified so far:

1. The problem occurs on both Macs and PC's
2. The problem has occurred on a number of different printer models and makes
3. As far as we can tell, users of RIPs do not suffer the same problems
4. The problem is variable and unpredictable i.e. it sometimes occurs with an image but next time will not
5. The problem is predominantly a Windows defect and it occurs in Windows 2000 and XP in various service packs

On the user group forums there are a number of proposed answers, investigated with varying degrees of rigour and attendant degrees of success when tried by others! Here are Professional Imagemaker's collected thoughts:

1. The problem is one of computing resource running out (hence the variability). You must have sufficient space on your spooler hard drive (C:\Temp by default).You can free up more space by changing the location of the spooler folder to another drive with more space. If you are running with a ¾ full 6GB drive forget it!

2. If the problem crashes your system you may also have a corrupt driver to repair as well. If just the printing crashes the spooler folder may not be cleared out thus compounding the resource problem.

3. Whilst the problem is worse on large prints, it has occurred when printing single A3 or multiple A4 sheets (in our experience this happened when printing with "Finest Detail" checked this may have been the thing which triggered the failure as it would require more resource).

4. The problem is not exclusive to low powered computers and has been seen on top of the range muscular machines as well.

5. There is a limit on the Epson driver around the 85 inch mark for both Mac and PC.

6. Photoshop 7 has a pixel limit of 30,000 (and yes we have hit it!).

7. Photoshop CS has a limit of 300,000 pixels (and we can't image how you could get to it!).

8. The problem is not limited to Photoshop, it occurs in Illustrator and InDesign - it is not an Adobe problem! However Chris Morris and Jaine Briscoe-Price recently appeared to solved their own problem by dropping down the allocation of RAM to Photoshop to 70% leaving more resource for the spooling process. This was a solution suggested by Microsoft engineers.

9. There is a bug in Windows which fixes a printing limit of 4 billion pixels in Windows 2000 with any service pack and Windows XP without service pack This works out to about a 40x50-inch print, give or take a few inches. The bug and the fix are described in Microsoft's Knowledge Base Article 318365.

10. None of the fixes proposed on various user forums has solved the problem for all time.

11. One suggestion which frequently comes up (including from the Epson engineers) is to turn off the "Enable advanced printing features". This little beauty has all the charm of a burst appendix -it causes mayhem and nobody even knows why it is there in the first place! Doing so solves many problems but definitely not all.

When it strikes, the problem is extremely frustrating. Within our own little group we have devoted whole days to making a single print, consuming vast quantities of consumables. It also has an uncanny knack of knowing when you are working on a tight deadline! On a more positive note see the remainder of the feature!

Left: Changing
the folder, which
Windows spools
to from the
default C Drive to
another (empty)
drive will
alleviate some
problems. Here a
separate g Drive
is allocated.

Left:
Microsoft recommend that
you do not allocate more
than 70% of your RAM to Photoshop so
that there is plenty left for the
spool processing The actual figure
will depend upon the total
amount of RAM you have onboard
your computer. Turning off other programs will
assist as well.

Left: The Advanced Printing Feature is a common cause of grief.

Printing with EPSON PageProofer

One of the most common tasks in a digital workflow is the organising of multiple prints at various sizes and different call-offs. Typically at the end of a wedding shoot you may be faced with an order for say 6 off 10x8, 3 off 4x5 and one each of images numbered 001 to 015. Printing each of these individually would be both time consuming and, on a roll printer, wasteful of media. The solution is to nest the images onto a single larger piece of paper and print in one go, followed by (hopefully) easy trimming along the long runs of borders. Traditionally the nesting function has been part of Raster Image Processing (RIP) software. However RIPs also provide a host of other features and are as expensive or even more expensive than the printer itself. Epson PageProofer provides a nesting facility for use on inkjet printers without resorting to a fully featured RIP and an attendant reduction is cost.

The software is simple. You start by making a page size of your choice, often some convenient length off a 24" or 17" roll of paper. You then click "get images" and navigate to the place where you images are stored. You then make a selection of images and drop them onto the page[1]. As they are placed they arrange themselves in the best orientation. You can call up default sizes, chosen siz Printing template es or reductions and duplicate images when required. If you fill the page a new one is started automatically. You can review at low resolution and uncorrected colour or soft proof your assembled page on an image-by-image basis. There is also a facility to employ the EXIF data to correct an image, which worked excellently for making quality proofs. Facilities are also available to add captions and file names when creating "contact sheets".

High level colour management may be applied including the icc input and output profiles, rendering intents and output simulations to presses.

Right: Images may be placed on the page free style (left) or
auto aligned for trimming (right).

Left: There are 5 simple boxes to attend to and the setting
remain sticky

Qimage

Terry Hansen wrote about Qimage some time ago. It is a program that he has used extensively and is very pleased with. Overall it functions in a similar manner to PageProofer but includes some additional features such as slide shows and built-in image adjustment. It is a simple program to use including the setting up of your chosen colour management features.

As shown in the screen grabs the source files are displayed as thumbnails in the top left view. They are loaded on the page to be printed by double clicking the thumbnail. If duplicates are required, double click the required number of times to keep adding copies. The sizes may be selected from the default button on the right, changed at will, or bespoke sizes set up. The arrangement on the page is optimised automatically for minimum paper wastage and efficient trimming. However you can set your own spacing rules should you wish to make special templates. Printing

The colour management is set up in a separate dialogue box and remains "sticky" once set. This is a huge advantage over the Photoshop Dialogue box, which sometimes seems to have a will of its own (it is logical but sometimes you are hard pressed to fathom, it out!). Profiles and rendering intent are also set here and remain even if the media is change downstream (hurray!!)

When "print" is clicked the familiar printer dialogue boxes pop up and your other setting may be applied. Printing with Qimage is slightly slower than printing directly from Photoshop but because the files are linked rather than embedded, they are only spooled as needed, thus eliminating some of the resource problems discussed in this feature as claimed by the users.

In addition to the printing facilities, Qimage will also generate slide shows from chosen sets of images, which can be set to display the slide reference number, file name date and time.There are facilities for converting RAW files, sharpening and colour adjusting.The latter can be done via curves, levels on a saturation, or even channel-by-channel basis. Also included are a cropping wizard and a red-eye removal facility.

The level of sophistication of such an inexpensive program is really quite astounding.The software can be downloaded from http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage

The Print Direct to ILFORD Galerie Driver

This is a utility available from Ilford. Essentially you install a virtual printer in your "Printers and Faxes". From then on when you wish to use (for example), your Epson 2100 with Ilford paper you choose the "Galerie used with Epson 2100" printer from the drop down list. Now when you get to the properties box you are confronted with icons which look like the box of Galerie paper in your hand and that is how you make your selection. It really is that simple! In the background the driver takes care of selecting the icc profile which is installed with the printer and out pops a very accurate print.

Whilst the choice of surfaces is limited to either Galerie Smooth Gloss or Galerie Smooth Pearl the results are quite outstanding - probably the best we have ever measured for the combination of a generic profile with a non-OEM media. Add to this the fact that these are inexpensive papers with a good reputation and you have a marriage made in heaven! Highlights from the statistics are tabulated below and for reference the data for a bespoke profiled Epson 4000 are also shown. The error measurement is Delta E 2000.We expect to get between 2.6 and 3.3 for bespoke profiling so the Smooth Pearl is a really good result. Visually the two prints were almost identical. The Pearl had about 5 RGB points more discrimination in the deepest shadows and a slightly deeper final blac Colour k. The all-important flesh tones were almost perfect in the Pearl, slightly desaturated and slightly magenta in the gloss. This difference was just detectable in the controlled light, viewing booth.

NOTE: This review was written before Ilford went into administration.They have promised to maintain supplies of their inkjet media but the position is naturally uncetain.

The SWPP 2008 Convention was an outstanding success,
we have 193 days to get ready for the 2009 convention - which starts on January 14, 2009

Photo Quote: It's marvellous, marvellous! Nothing will ever be as much fun. I'm going to photograph everything, everything! - Jacques-Henri Lartigue