I'm working in a commercial environment so we print a lot of stuff that gets thrown at us by customers. A typical scenario would be a request for A5 prints from a file sized at A4 or A3, and we knoiw that we just have to enter 70.7% or 50% to get the right size. Another would be where we have a customer's file set up to print at a specific size, but they decide they want it 'half as big again' (so 150%).

So it's the absolute percentage that I'd find useful, not (e.g.) '10% reduction' (I'd put in 90% for that).

It is sometimes useful to be able to enter different % for width and height, for example if we have an image that needs to fit a 20"x16" frame, is 20x15.5 and won't stand cropping, but can be stretched slightly.

Having recently bought the Photoshop plugin I can do this kind of thing much faster now, but if I had, say, 20 images that all need the same % change it could get tedious.

1) It would be incredibly useful to be able to use scaling percentages in the Custom Print Size bit.

2) Is there a way to change the default location Qimage goes to for color profiles? I keep mine on a networked server and it's a time-consuming slog to get to the relevant folder to add a new profile. I realise I'm in a tiny minority who'd find this useful, but I can't see any editable .ini files.

Thanks

Answering my own question in my previous comment: yes, there's more than one way to get into the printer driver - you can go through the dropdown menu or corresponding keyboard shortcut (my normal workflow) or you can click on the yellow triangle or green tick next to 'Driver Setup' - using the second method  avoids the issues I outlined originally.

The problem has manifested itself while I'm printing to an Epson SC-T5200. Is there more than one way of getting into the printer driver from Qimage?

Green tick or no tick, makes no difference: if I call up the printer driver and make no changes, if I exit the driver by pressing OK things get reset. If I press cancel, all is well. Obviously if I do makes changes, e.g. changing roll cutting to ON or OFF, I have to press OK to exit and things get reset.

I can't trigger similar problems if I print through the printer driver directly from Photoshop, so I don't think it's a driver issue.

I have several other wide format printers (all Epsons normally run via a Wasatch RIP) that I could use with Qimage so I'll test using their drivers when I get the chance,

Here's the scenario: I set up parameters for a job, or maybe open a saved job, I'm happy with everything, but before sending to print I go into the printer driver, maybe to change the print resolution, maybe to check if roll cut is on or off, but even if I make no changes, when I exit the printer driver some parameters in Qimage have changed: interpolation setting, sharpening & corner crops will all reset to Qimage's defaults. That's not too bad, but it also drops my custom ICC profile and reverts to 'Let printer driver manage color' - and as the printer driver has color management turned off, results are terrible, and this is expensive if I'm doing a large print or a long run - I have wasted huge amounts of paper due to this 'reset' behaviour.

Oh, I just discovered that if I go into the printer driver and make no changes but press 'OK' to finish, the above happens, if I hit 'Cancel ' it doesn't happen.

This didn't happen in previous versions.

That's a CMYK dye-sub printer and Qimage only works with RGB printers.*

Using Wasatch was probably Epson's best option for a printer with a limited user base like this: it's fairly quick and easy to set up optimal ink curves, but I'd agree that it's not very user-friendly for the day-to-day operator.


*(if there is a way for Qimage to print directly to a CMYK printer I'd love to have that info.)

QU is great for jobs where a large number of files have to be printed to a uniform size and with standard parameters. Or when we've been supplied with low-resolution images - after a little pre-treatment, I can usually get astonishing results using QU's on-the-fly interpolation and sharpening.

When working from image files that we've produced (we're fine art printers), Mirage handles the very large file sizes (anything from 300Mb to 3Gb) faster and more reliably than QU; setting up individual margins, crop marks etc. is much more straightforward than with QU. Mirage replaces the standard Epson driver, and all the settings you're likely to need are immediately to hand. If you have more than one Epson printer, Mirage will control them all using the same interface (it's simple to jump between printers).

Our non-fine-art services are fairly standard poster and display printing, for which clients typically supply us with PDFs, and this is where Mirage comes into its own: it looks like they've added a PostScript interpreter in the latest version because it will now handle even very complex PDFs quickly and accurately. If you have to handle PostScript, Mirage is worth considering: as well as the Photoshop plugin, you also get plugins for Illustrator and InDesign.

So Mike, you're right, doing large batch jobs via Mirage would be a pain - certainly not impossible but QU is the tool for that.

For jobs where there's a mixture of different sizes with varying margins and different types of crop marks on the same sheet, that's very straightforward with Mirage and considerably less so (or maybe impossible) in QU.

QU's interpolation and sharpening doesn't have a counterpart in Mirage. Mirage's PDF ripping ability doesn't have a match in QU.

These applications represent two very different approaches to making high quality prints, and I'm not sure that one should be considered a direct competitor to the other. From my point of view, having both at my disposal means I can do everything a stupid-priced RIP ($1500 - $2500) would do and a whole lot more. Even better, I can use the same ICC profiles with QU, Mirage and the standard Epson drivers.

I use both Mirage v3.1 and QImage and I wouldn't be without either. There's no need to choose one or the other. They're quite different in their approach and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

If you're comfortable with QI keep using it, the support from Mike is great.

Floating text is one of those facilities I never knew existed until 10 minutes ago - hard to find, but looks incredibly useful. Thanks Mike.

I understand that workarounds exist to all these points, but I'm trying to avoid extra work and multiple versions of images.

PSD files do contain sizing info though I understand that not all apps can make sense of it. To me this is an annoying glitch in a utility like Qimage: it can read fairly complex multi-layered Photoshop documents, but not pick up the sizing info?

Fred, you seem to be saying that printing file info inside the Photo Mat just below the image is desirable... it's the last place I'd want it and I can't think of any circumstance where it would be useful. If I use the normal Borders tool in the Print Properties dialog, that puts the file info just outside the border area, not inside it; I don't understand why Photo Mats work differently.

I've had Qimage Ultimate for a couple of years now but it's only in the last two or three months that I've started using it as part of my daily workflow.

Now that I'm familiar with the software, there are a few things that frustrate me:

1) Qimage won't pick up size information from PSD files in the same way it will from TIFFs or JPEGs. If I have a tiff file sized 50cm x 40cm at (say) 267ppi, it will print to the correct size, but the same image as a PSD wouldn't: it would assume the image was 300ppi (or whatever value I have set as default) and consequently print to the wrong size. Is this fixable?

2) The ability to add uneven borders round an image is great. I do loads of prints every day and the ability to enable 'Info' and print useful data next to the image is very useful. But I have to turn that option off when using photo mats because it prints next to the image rather than just outside the mat area (see image). Thankfully I can keep 'Edges' enabled because they print where they should. Up until the latest update I was also getting - I think - 'Preview' printed outside the mat with Info enabled, but that seems to have stopped.

3) PSD and TIFF files that contain Alpha channels seem to confuse the hell out of Qimage sometimes, making the image garbled, at least in the Queue preview pane; I've never let one go to print as I assume it's a WYSIWYG preview.

I work in the LAB color space quite a bit, but printing LAB images from QImage Ultimate produces prints which are almost black.

Is this a limitation of the program or, being relatively new to it, am I missing something obvious?