Hi Stephen
Should be easy to do in Qimage.
Simply add a border in WHITE. No ink will be sprayed, and the crop marks or corners appear at the edge of the border.
See snap attached
Fred

Stephen,
Can you describe what doesn't work, borders or color or corner marks?
I have attached 2 screen snaps.
First one is Print Preview  of Rel Colorimetric
Second is Print Preview of Absolute Colorimetric.

These are print previews of the actual print..... created in the driver.
You  can see the crop marks outside the border

Fred

Thanks, Fred, for taking the time to help with this.

It's border colour that is an issue for me when I print with AbsCol. My borders are set to white, but they get inked because of how AbsCol works. See my attached print preview, with Qimage in the background. The light blue border shown in the print preview carries through to print.

This is all correct, expected behaviour. Qimage is not getting anything wrong. I am not getting any settings wrong either.

I just want to get around it: when I need to print with AbsCol I want to be able to add borders that are completely un-inked.
For me this means being able to set transparent borders. OR being able to set crop marks/lines with an offset that I specify.

(PS: I can see tone in the borders in the two print previews you posted. Did you set borders to pure white? If so check the print you made through AbsCol: is there ink in the borders?)

I take it you just want crop marks at some distance outside the print.  First I would like to say that if white causes a light blue border, you probably want that border to be light blue!  If you have any white areas in your photos (white car, white shirts, white roses, etc.) they will look white if the border prints slightly bluish as you show it.  If you do what you are suggesting and just print the photo and cut some paper border around it, your eyes will adjust to the white of the paper and the white subjects in your photos will appear to have a bluish tint.  Even if there is no white in your photos, a paper white border is likely to throw off the color balance because your eyes adjust to the paper which is the wrong neutrality.

In other words, even though the border looks slightly bluish, that is defined as white (not just as a border color but also in your photos too) so if you actually cut the paper at the crop marks and view it without the paper color around it, it'll look like it should because the border won't look bluish once cut as there is no paper white surrounding it.

Having said that, you can do what you want which is just place the crop marks outside the print without printing a colored border.  Here's how.  You don't mention your paper sizes so I'm going to use the example of printing a 7x9 print with a half inch border around it (to give me a cut 8x10):

• Add the print at a size of 7x9 by clicking the thumbnail and then choosing the "Custom" print size and picking 7x9 under the "enter specific size" option.
• On the Prints tab, check the box labelled "Set as new working size" under the listed print sizes.
• Now choose 8x10 to make that the new working size (you can also pick a custom size like you did in the first step).
• Under the live view, drop down the print placement button and choose Template/centered.

After doing that, you'll have a 7x9 print inside an 8x10 template and any crop marks will appear at the template location (8x10 size).  No border is printed because you are simply using this method to place the print and crop marks.

Regards,
Mike

Hi Ernst.
Hope all is well.
I had thought of a possible reason/answer as to  why I do not get a tone or color in my prints when I actually print and do not rely on Print Preview.

I am using a Canon Pro 100 printer, Canon OEM ink, and most importantly, CANON PAPER
I suspect that the canon driver is responding to the settings and seeing PRO LUSTER, knows the paper color. Possible??
So when I print, that border is invisible under a strong Ott light or any light.

Fred

All objects in QU are color managed which means that borders, templates, page background color, and even text all get profiled.  Most papers have optical brighteners and even if they don't, the white of the paper differs from white as defined in color spaces so when you print with absolute colorimetric, it's going to try to "make" the paper the white of the color space, so some ink will be used to try to balance the paper white to actual D50 white.  Since most profiles define the paper white as 100% luminance (brightness), it usually only results in a slight change.  On most of my profiles it's hard to tell that any ink is laid down particularly after the print is cut from the page, unless you look with a magnifying glass and then you can see some sparse dots that are trying to change the tint of the paper.

I typically only use Absolute Colorimetric when I'm printing a logo or some graphic that I want to be sure is the right absolute color.  For photos, I'm fine with the photo being adjusted to match the paper white since your eyes adjust to that and lighting is often dynamic anyway, so I use Relative Colorimetric.

Mike

I wish I could get papers locally (South Africa) that meet these criteria. I can get warm papers without OBAs or more neutral papers that rely on OBAs but not neutral papers without OBAs. I've think I have tried all that are available in our market. What papers do you suggest? (I've played with Canson papers that got pretty close, but alas, no distributors here)

Mike: the template trick works. A little fiddly, but not that bad. I haven't tested the cutting-to-border trick yet.