I want to send images to an online print service using Qimage's Print To File feature.
AFTER resizing in Qi Ultimate, I want to add a frame in my photo editor, PhotoLine.
The paper sizes are from 500 x 700 mm to 700 x 1000 mm. The service uses Epson printers, 9600 amongst others.

I have fiddled around in Qi and got confused. In Mikes article "Wide Load: Tips for Printing LARGE",
 http://ddisoftware.com/tech/articles/february-2006-wide-load-tips-for-printing-large/msg25/#msg25
chapter "Understanding software differences WRT sizing",

I am relieved to read

"In Qimage, you will be told that the print size is larger than one page and will be asked if you want a poster. If you say no, you'll end up with a 15.766 x 19.333 inch print (same size as PhotoShop) but without the edges cropped off."

This is what I want. It does not matter that the image is slightly resized, but it must not be cropped, and it must not have a margin. So how do I achieve this?

The following settings seem to work, but I'd appreciate if you could confirm, and I have some questions.

As an example, I have chosen an image which is 480.0 x 665.3 mm, to be printed to a 500 x 700 mm sheet.
(The 480 measure is chosen, the 656.3 is obtained by resizing in my editor with Lanczos 3, just to try out.)

Here are the settings I tried:

File/Print to/File:
Page width: 480 mm, Page height: 665.3 mm, Resolution 240 PPI.

DEFAULT Print Properties: (Print Properties accessed via the button at bottom right under the preview image).
Here I don't know if I am to select B or B+. I have read the popups, but don't really understand what they mean. I think what confuses me is that I am not sure how "print" size relates to (net) image size on the one hand and to paper size on the other. Anyway, I have set Borders to 0. Also I see that choosing "add borders" or not in Properties/Custom/Specific SIZE changes this setting automatically backwards, so to speak.

Special Sizes FIT to page: Auto Cropping OFF.
Special Sizes BORDERLESS:
Here, Auto Cropping can not be turned off, which confuses me.
When I go back to FIT, it looks like I left it, Auto crop OFF. But if I click OK, THEN go back to FIT, Auto Crop is turned ON.

Then, in the Print Properties for the INDIVIDUAL image, (accessed via the button inside the image; however, this opens the same dialog):
Print Properties/Custom/Special Sizes/Enter specific SIZE: 480 x 665.3
I chose not to add borders, but wonder if it makes any difference with borders set to 0.

Result:

Now, the info on top of the preview image says Page: 479.9 x 665.2 mm
The mouse pointer hovering over the image itself says 480 x 665.3 mm - success!
So this is what Mike writes, the image slightly larger than the page.
Opened in my editor, the image does not look cropped - can I be sure that it is not?

Another question concerning print resolution in Job Properties: Help, Example 1, §2, says that the first of the 2 resolution values should be set to Max, the second to High - why not both to Max? This is also what is recommended in the table at the end of Mike's article quoted above.

Also in Job properties: Printer ICC: My print service has advised me to use a standard profile (ProPhoto in my case), NOT their paper profile. The Help example 1 §3 however says OFF. ?.

Thank you for any help!
Hening.

Hi Terry,

thank you for your fast reply.

I leads me to new questions, and some clarification I may need to do.

Concerning the procedure:
I think the print service will print on rolls. He just advised me to supply 1 file per image, so this 500x700 was just to give a rough idea of the sizes I'm talking about.
(This is the paper size I will have to pay for.) Also they will cut the image in the end, so I need not worry about that. I only want to avoid any cropping or adding unwanted stripes before I add the frame.

Adding the frame before resizing will not work for me. The width of the frame is calculated WRT to the final size, and so is the size of a little text inside the outer black frame. I will not adjust the frame to fill the paper size. The frame is part of the image in the sense that its proportions should be as I want them.

So I think if my above procedure is in fact correct and giving me a non-cropped image, I will stick to that. In the end it is more important that it works as intended than that I understand it…

I have now set 720 ppi in the PTF dialog, and it is reflected in Edit/Prefs/Printing Options and on top of the image preview. But the mouse hovering over the image still shows 240 ppi - ??

On 2 images, my above procedure seems to have worked. On a third, there is a little  problem. In Print Properties/Special Sizes, I entered 757.3 x 569 mm. On top of the Page Preview, it says 757.3 x568.9. So one direction is reduced, the other not. I guess it has something to do with mm and whole pixels. Will it produce a narrow white stripe on the one side? 0.1 m does not sound much, but my frame contains an inner light-gray edge which is just 3 pixels wide, which then would be widened by 1/3rd  on one side only (at 240 dpi, where 1 pixel is about 0.1 mm).

Then a question that has actually nothing to do with procedure or understanding Qi in particular, but print scaling in general.

I thought like this: There are 2 ways of resizing an image: changing the printing resolution, or interpolating the image. And I thought that changing the printing resolution was less damaging to the image than interpolating. Hence, since I want to enlarge the image, I set the lowest acceptable resolution. Now I understand on you that I should print at the printers native resolution regardless that this would require heavier interpolation. Correct?

Regardless which resolution I end up choosing: Why not the same for print and poster? Is a "poster" in Qi (in Job Properties) defined as stretching over the edge of a given paper size, or just as a print above a certain size? For 1 given image, what relevance has it to specify 2 (different?) resolutions? In other words: If I specify 2 different solutions, which one will Qi choose for a given image?

Thanks again for your help. Hening.

Hi Terry

>> But the mouse hovering over the image still shows 240 ppi

I have now loaded a new copy of the same image, after having set Qi to 720 ppi, and now, the mouse hovering over the image says 116 ppi, a lower value, as exspected.

The 0.1 mm white sliver on the 757.3 x 569 mm image:

>I eliminated it by checking the PTF size in the Queue tab (the page size above the preview was the same value too) and then entered that value in the PTF dialogue as the page size. You would get a white sliver otherwise.

I understood this in the way that you entered the reduced size in the PTF dialog? in this case 757.2 mm

I did that and got a message "The new page size is too small for some of the prints in the queue. All prints larger than 1 page will be resized to fit on the page."
 
and now the display is as follows:
Top of preview dialog:    757.2 x 568.9 mm (720 x720)
Print Queue dialog:       757.2 x 590 mm
Mouse over image:       752.2 x 569.0

So the page has been reduced, but so has the image, and the sliver will still be there. And the print service can not cut it off: it will be between "net" image and frame.

The 2 images where everything seemed to work were in portrait orientation, whereas this one is in landscape. Could it have something to do with this?

>>And I thought that changing the printing resolution was less damaging to the image than interpolating
>I'm not sure what you mean here?

On the monitor, If I set resolution to 240 ppi, I get an image of a certain size if viewed at say 100%. If I decrease resolution to 96 ppi and still view at 100%, the image is much larger. So here I can increase image size without interpolating - i.e making up new pixels which are not real, as I understand it, and which I associate with reduced image quality. But obviously, I miss something here.

>>If I specify 2 different solutions, which one will Qi choose for a given image?
>Again, not sure what you mean here.

I have loaded 1 image. In Job Properties, there are 2 Resolution fields. If I enter 2 different values, which one will Qi choose for this one image? I think it must choose Poster only for the cases where Poster is specified by extending over the paper border.

> Qimage chooses (normally) the native resolution of the printer from the driver setting.

So I must check with the service to get the driver setting. If he does not do it on beforehand, I hope I can talk him into using Finest Detail and 720 dpi.

Puh this is complicated!
Thanks again for your help. Hening.

> You could calculate the PTF page size accurately using the whole number of pixels and use that.

I tried to do this.
To calculate the exact size, I faked resizing in my editor (on a dup of the image). Setting 720 dpi and the short side to 480 mm, the pixel count became 18,111 * 13,606 = 638.9 * 480.0 mm.

I entered these mm values into Qi in the PTF dialog and in Print Properties/Custom/Enter specific SIZE, and clicked BORDERLESS.  I got the exspected "Is-too-large"-dialog. As the result, Qi displays the following:

Top of image preview:    638.9 x 479.9 mm
Print Queue:            637.7 x 480.0
Mouse over image:      637.7 x 480.0, 137 dpi

Something must be wrong. On the long side, the page is larger than the image (by as much as 1.2 mm), on the short side the page is 0.1 mm smaller than the image, as exspected. This can not be a matter of the second post-comma digit.

The image is displayed correctly in landscape orientation.

Hening.

I'm not sure why, the only thing I can think of the monitor resolution is too course to show the small differences.
If you had put the new image in the Qimage queue with the same page size and hovered the mouse over the preview, that too would show 720ppi 
One other tip, when playing with those small (or large) differences in the page size, you should really go back to Custom size and re-apply Fit to Page.

If you have got this correct now, and are likely to use the same size etc. again, save it as a Print Set-Up. Next time just re-call the set up and add an image to the queue.

Terry

> you should really go back to Custom size and re-apply Fit to Page.

I did that, and had 1 bright idea myself (this happens) - I chose Center in the button underneath the image preview. Result as before - EXCEPT that mouse over image now shows 638.9x480! AND there was no "too large" warning. So the image is OK. Still I am confused that the display at top of the preview does not show the 0.1 m reduction as exspected.

I see that you have posted in the meantime. Thank you that you go to the extent of experimenting yourself. Your results are slightly different from mine. You have the same data displayed on top of the preview as under the mouse, whereas in my example, the preview data are reduced in 1 direction, not the other - where I had exspected in either, after reading Mikes article. And after it was exactly like that in the 2 other images (verticals).

2 other differences:
How do you manage to get Crop Scissors off? Mine snap back to On when I click the BORDERLESS button. Maybe you have not done that?
Thinking over it, it occurs to me that this Borderless stuff is irrelevant since the output from Qi is not going to the printer.

And:
I have never seen the scissors icon at the bottom of the image as in your first snap.

Now I tried to avoid BORDERLESS. I discover that there are 2 places where to choose Fit to Page: Print Properties and Print Properties/Custom/Special Sizes. I clicked both.

Still, I get 479.9 mm over the preview, 480 mm under mouse and in Print Queue.

I can hardly imagine that this has anything to do with the screen resolution being too coarse - I wouldn't think that Qi gets its data from the screen??

Thanks for clarification, Mike!