What I am after

I am a photographer who wants to produce high quality prints, largely for club competitions, large (A3) images for displays and the like. So printing tends to be in bursts, but not that frequent. My workflow is to shoot (Canon) raw files. These are converted mainly using UFRaw or sometimes Canon's DPP for batches. My main image editor is GIMP 2.8. I have an Epson R2880 and use 3rd party refillable ink cartridges (Lyson) and paper (Ilford). I produce my own ICC profiles using ColorMunki.

This all works fine except for the actual printing step. GIMP is not good at printing and I have struggled to find a something that will allow me to print using my own profiles. The Epson print driver is pretty insistent on offering only Epson's paper and ink options unless you turn off colour management completely in the driver. Hence I need printing software that will manage the layout of my finished images on the page and apply my colour profiles.

Via Googling the problem, I came across QImage (actually an article on QImage Lite) as a possible solution. So I downloaded the 14-day trial of QImage Ultimate (v2013.123) and gave it a go.

Comments

Firstly, it does the job splendidly. I can position one or more images as I want on the page and produce very high quality results using my own profiles. Fantastic!

However, I have found it rather sluggish and flakey. I am running on a 4-core i7 machine with 15Gb of RAM under Windows 8 64-bit - so it is not underpowered! I find that adding images to a layout often leads to a long pause - with the consequence I tend to press the button more than once and suddenly find I have several pages in the queue. I have also had "List index out of bounds" errors quite frequently. But the real problem is removing images I don't want or have finished with. This is REALLY slow - either clicking the little red "no entry sign" icon on the image in the layout or via the "Clear Queue" context menu item. The biggest problem I have found is that "Clear Queue" menu item. This often seems to freeze the whole thing (I get a "program is not responding" message and have to shut it down). I have found that the best way of avoiding these problems is to print one page, shut the program down, restart, then layout and print the next page as a separate run. I am sure that these problems can be sorted out (I see that there is a version 124 for registered users - maybe that will sort some of these issues).

BUT, the Ultimate version is massive overkill. It has loads of image editing stuff I don't need - I really don't want to get into learning the quirks of yet another image editor and it has lots of stuff, like print logging, that is obviously aimed at professionals who do a lot of printing. Is the Lite version still available? That would seem to do everything I want from looking at the feature comparison chart.

Stuart

Stuart, I'm not associated with Qimage, but I do use Qimage Pro. I have a Intel Core2 running at 2.7 GHz with XP. I do not have any of the issues you describe when loading fairly large JPEG (7 MB or so) files. Qimage produces some fairly large print files as part of the print process, so processing and sending the data to the printer is not instant. I find it quite reasonable though.

I suspect either the Lite or Pro version would suit your needs. I believe the main difference is the one step more advanced Hybrid interpolation available on the Pro version. However the Vector interpolation on the Lite is likely far superior to the freeware you are using now.

As I understand it the Lite, Pro, and Studio versions are still available to buy but are not going to be improved. There are no more upgrades. I don't see that as an issue as they are all quite mature and stable. I'm not even using the latest version of Pro that is available.

I'm not exactly sure what the Ultimate version is like, but I assume you can select other interpolation methods other than Fusion. You could simulate the quality you would have in the Lite version by doing some test prints with Pyramid and Vector selected, and then compare to the Hybrid available in the Pro version.

You may want to check on OS compatibility. The retired versions are said to be suitable up to Windows 7.