Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

I'm am trying to create a 24x24 print and a 5x10 print on a 24" roll of paper.
I have it set to borderless printing, the images are perfectly positioned in the preview window, but when I print, it prints at double size which means it's only printing half the image on the 24" wide roll.
I'm assuming this has something to do with resolution but...I can't figure it out.
Please help!
Thanks,
Prem

Check the printer driver for having "scaling" or auto fit turned on,  or some other interference to the size Qimage is sending to the driver.
Just to be sure, please check the print sizes in the queue. These are accurate. If it  says 24 x 24", then that's what is going to the driver.

Any deviation from that, is driver setting related.

If you cant seem to find the culprit, use Qimage, Help, Reset Printer.
Then reset your paper choice etc.

What kind of printer?


Fred

Thanks Fred.
There was an option under borderless printing that said "fit paper size" or "scale to fit roll paper width.
I changed it to say "fit paper size" and tried to print again with the same problem.

However, it seems like anytime I make any changes, it changes other things.  After I made that change in the driver, qimage resized my photos and now it's totally off.  Now it says that the images are 14.35x14.24 @ 502ppi.  The paper is now showing 1003 ppi and it's also showing 1003 ppi under the print and poster.
So if it's actually printing at 14x35x14.24, why when I hit print is it actually coming out about 4 times that size even when the preview screen shows it looking perfect?

I've also had issues where when I "trim white area of the bottom" it makes the photos half scale and I have to redo everything.

I like the potential of this program but I've wasted so much money on ink and paper and gotten so much frustration that I'm about to give up and just go back to manual placement in photoshop.

I started from scratch.  Checked print driver settings, checked the output size from qimage, everything looked good.
Send to print...same problem.

(http://www.arisingimages.com/temp_folders/temp/kneisler.jpg)

Just printed straight from photoshops export plugin for my ipf8300.  worked perfectly...no problems, no scaling issues.

I don't know what an export plug is does, but it sounds like something designed so your printer will be happy with some particular set up.
Nevertheless, I have attached a shot of my screen with your printer engaged, showing the actual print size that Qimage is sending to the driver.
That's what I wanted to see on your screen snap.
What is the actual size that Qimage is sending to the printer.

I also see that you actually have two images to print.
The upper part is a composite all in one image.
The lower part is the same, a composite.
So I made a 31.0 x 24.02 defined page in borderless.
That gave me 24.016 x 31.00 printable area.
I made the car print 24.0 x 30.

As you can see by the information shown in the screen snap, it's all there.
Printable area above the car, and print size in the queue below the car.

That is what Qimage sends to your printer driver.
I cannot comment on what your windows driver is doing to the image without your special plug in.

Best I can do.
Anyone else have this printer?
Fred

Sorry, I thought that's what the yellow popup box was showing.
On the bottom of the screen it shows the first image at 24x24 @ 300 dpi and the other image at 5x10 @ 300 dpi.  Both are showing sRGB.

Please let me know if you need more info to solve this.
Thx.

That yellow popup is proof positive that Qimage Ultimate is sending 24x24 to the printer driver.  What it displays is the actual rectangle on the printer's canvas so 24x24 is going to the driver and then the driver is modifying the size to override it.  That can only happen if some scaling is set in the driver itself.  I would suggest that you post the screens in your printer driver: maybe we'll see an option that affects scaling.  The only other possibility is that you have a new driver and it is not compatible with settings from the previous driver that was used when printer settings were saved by Qimage.  To correct this, you must recreate the driver settings from scratch.  Click "Help", 'Reset printer settings" and when you restart Qimage, set the driver settings manually (without recalling a printer setup or job).  Once you recreate the settings, you can save them for future use.  If incompatible settings are the problem, they occur when you load an old printer setup or job that has settings based on an old (and now incompatible) driver.

HTH...

Regards,
Mike

Hi Mike,
I can't find any other settings that would lead me to think that scaling is happening.
This is a new computer and all programs were just installed last week. 

(http://www.arisingimages.com/temp_folders/temp/1.jpg)

(http://www.arisingimages.com/temp_folders/temp/2.jpg)

(http://www.arisingimages.com/temp_folders/temp/3.jpg)

I tried turning borderless printing off and it printed fine from qimage. 
When I send it as a borderless print job from qimage, the size gets all messed up. 
When I send it as a borderless print from other programs, it prints fine.

I know you are saying that this is not a qimage problem but it sure appears to be.

I think it's time you opened the manual that came with the printer. I'm sorry I don't have one.
If I hover over the choice of dots: One says, Prints borderless with scaling of document automatically depending on page size.

The second dot says: Prints borderless with the document enlarged or reduced to fit the document width to the roll of paper.

Try this!  I don't have the printer so I can't actually print to paper, but the print preview from the driver looks right!
Turn off borderless. That shuts off scaling.
Set the page size to 25.0 x 32.0
Set your print size to 24.0 x 30.0
It seems to work here based on the print driver preview.

Fred

So just to be clear, you are saying that if I want to print a borderless 24" print on 24" paper, I need to turn borderless OFF and then make a page size that's bigger than my actual roll width?
This is getting confusing.  I'm in agreement that this is a driver issue but...I don't know what to do about and what you suggested doesn't make sense to me.  Can you explain it again please?
Sorry.

I think I might have it figured out. 
The "print with actual size" option was grayed out under the borderless printing options.
However, when I change the paper back to the original 24x100 size, it allows me to use the actual size option.
If I then "remove white space from bottom", qimage screws everything up and resizes the images and I have to remove everything and recreate the print queue
However, if I just send it to print and have the print driver remove the extra white space, then it works fine.

That's exactly what I was trying to tell you.
I quoted what the driver information was telling us.
It was scaling the print because the two "live" choices were each scaling/resizing.
The one we needed was grayed out. That's why I asked you to look in the book.

OK on the cut off white space, I think you are referring to what Qimage does *after* your first try.
It re-sized the page, and consequently the subsequent print too.
It is explained in a pop out message when you are using that cut off white space.
You have to go and reset the paper size in the driver back to the original size.
See screen snap attached.
Fred

What I was saying was:
*TRY* to fool the driver with a larger size in User defined, with borderless off.   I was asking you to test it.  My object was to get that part of the driver that GRAYS OUT  (Leave the print size alone) to come alive and have the other two selections that resize the prints, to be grayed out.

What is confusing is you are posting to two different threads :-)

Fred

I was hoping we could stick with one setup to figure it out, because changing things midstream (between question and answer) makes it a moving target.  Above you had a screen shot if a 24x30 page with a 24x24 print.  On that screen shot, I can tell that Qimage was sending a 24x24 to the printer but at the top of that shot I can see 1003 PPI from the driver indicating it is doing some serious scaling.  That's why I wanted to see the driver screens for that setup.  Now we have a new setup that shows a 24 x 100 paper size so I'm not sure where to go from there because we don't have a corresponding QU preview to go with that.  But seeing that you've created a new thread with newer info, I'll move over to that thread and address it there.

Mike

Sorry Fred, I originally thought they were two different issues but they appear to be related.
If you want to delete the other thread, that's fine.

When I made the paper a larger size, checked the box that says "use actual size", add my images to the print queue and then trim the white off, the images get resized.  It does this ALL the time regardless of what option is checked in the borderless box and regardless if the borderless box itself is checked or unchecked.  It ALWAYS does this.

I should add that it does this even when I use a 20x20 on a 24" wide paper so this issue is not related to having an image that needs to be scaled.

See my last post in the other thread about trying it without the poster size, but if the above is true (even when you don't have a poster size), then there is a bug in the printer driver where it is not responding properly to paper size changes outside the driver.  Because I can't change the driver, the solution to that would be to not use a page size that is too big so that you have to trim it: use the correct paper size up front.

That said, this still sounds like a problem with scaling in the driver.  Per the other thread, you have to select "print image with actual size" when you select borderless otherwise the driver is going to be doing scaling.  What happens if you don't select that option is that as soon as you give Qimage Ultimate the command to remove white space, QU sends a command to the driver telling it to reduce the paper size: then the driver sees the new paper size and it RESCALES the image to try to fit the new size.  And therein lies the problem.

Mike

Mike and Fred,
Thanks for the info, time, and help. 

The easiest solution seems to be to do the white trimming inside the print driver and then not worry about.

I'm not sure if this is related or not but it seems that when I choose different options, my dpi changes.  sometimes it shows 300, sometimes 600, sometimes 1000 when i'm using the same image.  is that related to the scaling issue?

I believe so.  At this point I think that the driver is doing some sort of "fit to page" type scaling and when you change the page length (via the trim function), it updates the paper size in the driver and that causes the driver to automatically rescale the print/size to fit the modified paper size.  The way the drivers often scale images is by increasing or decreasing the PPI reported back from the driver.  So in this case it just looks to me like the trim function in Qimage Ultimate and the driver's page/image scaling are not playing together nicely.  I haven't seen that problem before as the ipf8300's options for borderless look a little "funky" in that they're not following the typical industry standard.  The Canon standard is to allow borderless and then offer an "amount of expansion" slider that controls how much borderless expansion is performed.  These new borderless scaling features (with the only one that allows NO scaling being grayed out when you do borderless) is something relatively new.  These new borderless scaling options appear to be quite limiting in that there appears to be no way to print a borderless print without the driver trying to scale it to the paper size.

Mike