Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Hello, I'm trying to print a large print 52" x 65" at 720ppi on an Epson 11880 onto glossy paper at a flexible photo printer service. The project is a lenticular print; so, a high and consistent resolution is very important. I'm able to do this by slicing the image up in PS and segmenting it in QU as one print. I've had problems with the printer cutting out mid print with an older version of Qimage Ultimate (2014). I've seen in this forum recommendations to set the spooling settings to RAW, which I've done. Also in posts (from around 2010) that really large prints recommending printing at 360ppi. Can someone weigh in if this is still the case with version 2022 of QU? Also the indication that interpolating of lenticular prints to 1440ppi, would there be any theoretical limits to print size?

thanks for any thoughts and advice on using QU for large and high res printing.

B

Qimage can handle single frames up to 1.5 to 2.0 GB so keep each panel in that range.  A 52 x 65 inch print at 720 PPI is 5 GB so it's probably best to split that into 2x2 (4) panels and let Qimage print those side-by-side.  As long as you are within the single photo limit of say 1.5 GB pixel size and your printer is printing in raw spooling mode, there should be no issue.

BTW I assume you have enough pixels in your original image for it to be 720 PPI at 52 x 65 inches?  In other words, is the original image you are printing 37,440 x 46,800 pixels?  The biggest mistake I see is that people often make an image too large in Photoshop and then feed it to Qimage: they'll take a 24 megapixel photo from a single camera image and upsample it to 5 gigabytes in Photoshop, save it, and then try to print it.  This is backwards and you'll lose quality!  Give Qimage the original 24 MP image and let it do the upsampling at print time.  And if you are stitching a bunch of panels together in Photoshop, don't do it in Photoshop if you already have the panels prepared and edited: lay out the panels on the page in compact placement in Qimage: Qimage will "stitch" them at print time.  That way you aren't creating massive photos and upsampling at the wrong stage in the process.

Regards,
Mike

thank you, lenticular is tricky but I think Qimage U really provides a path for large scale.

best regards,
Billy 2

The Epson 11880 printer aborted the printjob of 8 segments butted together to make a continuous image (each around 760mb 41859 pixels wide 6428 high).  Banner Roll was not selected. Does the Banner Roll option help prevent the driver from getting overloaded? Qimage is set to 720ppi - in my case; a  required setting. Thanks.

What does "aborted" mean?  Did you get an error message?  I don't think banner mode would matter since the driver would receive the same amount of data.  The most important thing is to be sure the spool mode is set to raw: Edit, Preferences, Printing Options.  Other than that, the driver might be happier if you didn't print all that data on one page: set the paper length smaller so it uses multiple pages along with banner mode so each "page" doesn't have a gap.

Mike

The print stops part way without a message - paper ejects. There's an inch high block mid way across the span of the image. I thought this would have to do with memory.
Your advice is to choose Banner Roll and to NOT specify any length to the image, correct?

thank-you

If you are not set to raw spool mode under Edit, Preferences, Printing Options, try that first.

Mike