Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Hi--

I read Fred's post from a while back about how to configure the printer settings for the Epson R2000--very helpful!-- but I have a question about configuration within Qimage.

Screen capture is attached. Are these settings fine to use as is, or is there any tweaking I should be doing with Resolution (either Max and/or High) and/or Interpolation Type? Are there "ideal" settings?

Thanks as always!

Liz

Hi Liz,
Providing you've got everything set up right in the driver (colour management off) the qimage settings you have will do just fine although depending on the version of q you're using 'Fusion' is the best interpolation method (unless Mike has added a new one in the last 6 months). As for ideal settings, you'll need to play with the sharpening setting. 5 is a good starting point and for the paper you're using it's most probably the right setting. There is a video on how to use the sharpening, basically you'll need to do some test prints with different sharpening settings, the idea is that your print should match the sharpening on screen when you get it right. Once you've found the ideal sharpening for that paper then you'll use the same settings every time after that. If you're using different papers then it's a good idea to save the settings that you found worked best for each and then you can simply recall them each time you change the paper.
To recap, there aren't really any ideal settings as there are so many different papers out there but with the sharpening set on 5 I've never had a bad (over sharpened) print (unless I overdid it in PS before I put it into Q), just the occasional print that I wished I'd sharpened a little bit more.

Hope that helps.

Jamie

Thanks, Jamie--very helpful. I do have Fusion as an option for interpolation, so I will use that. I will also look at the training video about sharpening at some point.

Thanks again!

Liz

No worries, you've just got to remember that in those settings it is output sharpening which is an extra step after you've got the image as sharp as you like on screen. When the ink soaks into the paper it will lose some of the sharpness that the image had on screen, so this is an extra step to compensate for that. It will vary depending on the paper as to how much sharpness is lost and so how much output sharpening you need to add, typically matte papers tend to suffer more. The good thing about Q is that it's pretty clever, so once you've found the sharpness that you like, you use the same setting everytime you use that paper. Q will automatically adjust it so that regardless of the size of your image, a sharpness setting of 5 will look more or less the same if it's 10x15cm, A3 or anything inbetween. If you were printing directly from say Photoshop then you would have to sharpen the image differently each time you wanted to print it at a different size.

Hope that helps.

Jamie

Yes, very helpful thanks again!

Liz