Hi Jamie,

It is not just nozzle blocks, but air in the feed tubes, too. You will be unlikely to be able to find a colour that will fire a particular nozzle, since you will have to take into account the icc profiling, etc. You'd need to write your own driver for that  .  I'm thinking that colour gradients may be the best option, hopefully you will see the banding. imho, the manual nozzle check/clean cycle works better than the auto method. I do not think merely printing a particular colour to work the air through will work, since the cleaning cycle uses a vacuum pump to suck the air/ink through. It is debatable whether it is better to leave the printer powered on, or off, between print sessions. If you can put a wet sponge/tray of water in the machine, and cover the machine with a polythene sheet, thus increasing the humidity in its vicinity will help, but not recommended if you forget to remove it before printing  .

Unfortunately the cleaning cycle does not work on individual colour nozzles, hence the ink wastage. Of course, if you were to get third party dye inks, then that solves the blocking situation, (but not the air locks)

Best wishes,

Ray

Adjust the platen gap, as Epson suggested. I'm not familiar with that printer, but the gap will be selected according to paper type, and there will be other adjustments you can make within the driver/epson control panel. Make sure the rollers are clean. I'm assuming you are getting an indent across the full width, due to the pressure being on the same position, gripping the canvas between print sessions for a period of time. Alternatively just advance the paper until that area is beyond the printing region.

Best wishes,

Ray

fwiw, some programs do not rely on the file name extension to determine the file type, some do. Some will want the old dos 3 letter extension. In Firefox, for example, you can save a jpeg image with a .tif extension (but it does not convert the image to a tif when it is saved) You can also save it with any other meaningless extension, e.g. 'image.ghjkl'. Firefox will automatically recognise them as as a jpeg  when it reopens them, whereas Irfanview offers the choice to automatically change the extension to jpg. Qimage Studio recognises jpeg (if not cmyk), jpg, but not a renamed jpg to tif - it flags that when opening Qimage allowing you to correct the name, and Qimage ignores files with meaningless extensions such as .ghjkl (and other none image file extensions, of course, as it should).

Always using the old dos (3 letter) extension, assigned to the correct file format is the safest way, for the time being, as you've found out.  

I don't use IE, but it doesn't surprise me that it tries to do something clever, without giving you a choice in the matter.  

Best wishes,

Ray

It is easy to not align the corners of the image correctly for the target - check you have selected the correct corners.

Best wishes,

Ray

It seems to me that you are trying to print near the limits of the canvas width, without understanding the settings within Qimage or your printer driver. That is why I suggested you started by printing a 20 inch square (or if you want to use metric, then 500mm would do  - just an easy size a bit below your canvas width - but remember which size you use). Just draw a square in Photoshop with a ten pixel wide brush, say, (you needn't waste ink) and crop the image to make it exactly square, with the colour at the edge of the image - we do not want a white border. When you get the image into QI, set the size to 500mm, and print it. Note your driver settings, if you've selected borderless printing/whatever, or in QI if you've selected anything else under the page formatting menu. Make sure you've set the page size in the driver to something like 24inches square. Measure the print on all four sides. If it is not square, or it's not within a mm or so of the 500mm, then let us know the measurements you get, and the details of your qi settings and printer driver settings.

If it's the subject's feet or eyes that are near the edge, as the op said earlier (other folk's images), you can't clone them out in the original image so they do not show in the QI gallery wrap. I don't think you can work on the wrap in the image editor, so the wrap has to made in some other software. I print my own images, mainly landscapes, so it is not so much of a problem, but it often would be better if you could edit the wrap.

Best wishes,

Ray

I think we're looking at the wrong problem. It is merely that the image you import from photoshop is not printing to the correct size (or rather the size you expect). The fact that the image contains a border or wrap is not relevant (except that is the convenient place for you to take measurements). I understand what you are saying about not being able to use the canvas wrap features of QI, but I use it exclusively for my own prints.

The image size that QI shows will be the image size you get (try inches instead of mm), provided you've not messed with borderless settings, and the printer is accurately set up, and the media loaded correctly. It is unlikely that your canvas is shrinking . However, you will be stretching your canvas over a frame, so maybe a few mm smaller is a good thing .  I expect there is a video or two on printing to accurate size. You can check the printer accuracy, by printing an image, say 20 inches square, and measuring it. There are settings (certainly for most Epsons), deep inside the service mode, for adjusting the print accuracy

If you are fixing the canvas with staples to the frame, at the back of the frame, then I guess you have a white border to the wrap area. Make that white border smaller, keeping the image and wrap the same size, so that the total image width is less than whatever qi says is the printable width of the canvas roll, and set the size to the actual size of this new image. The unprintable edge of the canvas can still be used for staples, of course. When you've sorted it out, then write down the relevant details for dpi, pixels, etc. that you see in qi, and photoshop. You will then be able to produce a spread-sheet, or otherwise calculate the size of image and border that photoshop needs in order to correctly print the size you want in QI. It will be easier if you consider the wrap as a percentage/proportion of the image, then you can choose whatever you want in ps, pixels or inches or whatever, and get it accurately sized in QI.

Don't bother with trying to get photoshop inches into QI inches, deal with pixels, as others have alluded to.

Best wishes,

Ray

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg487503.aspx  refers to XP and other os ram limits.
Below is my boot.ini file

boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /3GB /fastdetect /noguiboot

Afaik, they dropped the PAE after sp2 (or maybe it was sp1 - I'm on sp3). noexecute implies it any way.

Other things, set the swap/page file to a disk other than the the OS, if possible. You can get there by: - my computer, system properties, advanced, performance settings, advanced, virtual memory, change . I've actually allocated an 8GB partition to the paging file, with an initial size of 4000MB as a custom size. Others may argue about letting the system manage the size - I'm just saying what works for me. Also set the memory usage and processor scheduling to 'programs' (on the last 'advanced' window).

You may also need to change your bios settings. If you still have less memory than you think you should have available, then I would suggest you do the three fingered salute, and check what processes you have running. Some software does not close properly, and still leaves memory allocated. Some devices may also use shared memory, but hopefully not many these days.

hth.

Best wishes,

Ray

somehow my post was duplicated - it wasn't that great  

fwiw, I upgraded my venerable xp pc a year or two ago to 4 GB ram. I've just done a quick check, I get 1221 MB for start and now. Running ps and other stuff does not seem to effect that value, and I've a fair number of background tasks running. I can't now remember the details of the manipulations I did to get the pc to see more memory, but there are plenty of answers on the web. iirc ps can utilise the extra memory, but normally the pc can only see the 3GB. Also, Irfanview, unless you set it otherwise, will open embedded jpegs, and not the actual file (at least with canon raws). (I'm not running Ultimate, however, but I guess the overheads are similar to Studio).

Just confirming what Mike said, you need to somehow get that extra memory functioning for QI.

Best wishes,

Ray

A simple test, quite basic. Take the print out into the daylight. Does it look dark then? 'Looking dark' is quite subjective, since the monitor transmits light, whereas the print reflects light. Set the white point of the monitor to match the white point of the canvas, if you want to view the print in similar lighting conditions as the monitor - judge it by eye, you don't need fancy gadgets to do that, (none are as clever as your eye, in any case  . It does not have to be that precise- simply hold a piece of unprinted canvas near the monitor, and glance from the screen to the canvas a few times, adjusting the screen controls (where you would be setting the white balance), until you get the same shade of white or cream or whatever. It may work better for you, it does for me. Of course, if you change to bright white gloss media, you may have to do it all again.

Best wishes,

Ray

If the paper is 10 inches wide, you will need to select borderless printing to get a print 10 inches wide. The actual normal printable width is shown on the page layout area on rhs, towards the top. The reduced printing area is nothing to do with qimage, but the mechanics of the printer/paper handling.

hth.

Best wishes,

Ray

Hi Jamie,

Qimage has canvas wraps, mirrored or stretched or coloured with fold marks which may save some flaffing around in photoshop. As Terry mentioned, Qi will print to Epsons at 720 ppi native resolution if you set the Epson driver to finest detail, (most likely it's a check box which is greyed out for some media, so you may need to fake the media, to get that selection for your particular media/printer). In any case I would be surprised if anyone will see the difference on canvas between 360 and 720 dpi native resolution. If you don't want to waste ink and canvas, there is a method for printing test strips, so you can see the effects of the various sharpening algorithms. Depending on the type of image you are dealing with, you may find that some algorithms and settings are better than others. When you are editing an image, you are dealing with pixels; when you are printing you deal with dots per inch. Resize and convert from pixels to dpi in qi, in comparison the photoshop resizing is not the best  .

There have been similar questions in the past - such as http://ddisoftware.com/tech/qimage-ultimate/interpolation-in-ultimate/  wrt finest detail and sharpening.

Best wishes,

Ray

The printer driver you are showing is not one supplied by canon, afaik. It looks as if it is a rudimentary one by default from Wine. Maybe you can install the correct canon driver for windows under crossover, maybe you can't.

Best wishes,

Ray

I think the quickest/cheapest way of converting pdf files is using IrfanView. you can possibly run it as a batch, and convert the whole document to tifs or jpegs or whatever image format takes your fancy. If you already have Adobe photoshop, then probably best to use that, since some pdf fonts can give problems with some pdf conversion programs. The quality of a pdf image depends on the settings in the software that is used to generate the pdf file. In general, Acrobat, for example, will try to compress the images to produce a small file, but you can increase the dpi, turn off compression, and produce a good quality image, but a in a very large file  .

Best wishes,

Ray