Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

I am very often printing test strips of art reproductions, but I have never been able to get the test strip feature to work for me in my workflow.

Instead, I load up one or more copies of the file at the size of the patches I want to print, e.g. 6x6 or 12x6. I will usually place 3 or more patches across a 24 inch roll. Then in the Full Page Editor, I click "apply to all copies" and then drag the Zoom slider to set the PPI to the desired value (typically 300 ppi) and hope that I can get the slider to land on or near the exact value. It is an imprecise process and often ends up at 296 or 302, etc.. It would be so nice to be able to just type in the PPI value. Once I Zoom to the PPI value, I pan the artwork in each section to the areas I want to print. I need the zoom level to match the original scan so I can lay the patches over the original artwork for colour matching.

Thanks so much and cheers!

Brad

You shouldn't have to enter any PPI or do any manual zooming:

1 Add the print at the full size you intend to print (let's say 24x36)
2 Go to the full page editor
3 On the cropping tab, click the test strip button (the print size reduces but ignore that: we'll choose the size test strip in the next step)
4 Right click on the print in the full page editor and select "New Size"
5 Choose "Custom", then "Specific Size" and enter the size test strip you want (let's say 3x3)

Step 3 turns on "test strip" mode so any size you enter in step 5 (including a size off the list like 4x6) will still be in test strip mode: it'll be a 4x6 strip of your original 24x36 size.  You can move the test strip around in the cropping tool to get the area you want for the strip.

Regards,
Mike

Hi Brad,
I think this might help
Read the text and play the video.

http://ddisoftware.com/tech/qimage-ultimate-challenges/challenge-54-the-test-strip/msg18736/#msg18736

Fred

Thanks so much Mike and Fred. I will certainly give the test strip feature another try.

Cheers!

Brad