Hi, Well after ALL the help I received from Fred on here I had to upgrade to the new offerings just await the download link. Thanks, Russ

Hi Vern,
I had to smile, appreciate, and reply to your post.
I used to have Photo Shop years ago because a club I belonged to considered it a "must" for digital images.
Sort of like an Amateur Radio club, that required that every member own an antenna for 20 meter and 15 meter bands.
I could swap heads. I could do Content aware... but you see, I love photography, and I enjoy shooting scenes that evoke a story or some emotion.
It has to be real to do that. If I have to borrow a moon or a sky, or a tree from another image to make this one look good, that's not me.
If an image needs that, go back and retake it properly.

I found Qimage..... I think it was 1998 or 1999.. it was called Peg Me.
I wrote to Mike, and slowly learned, bit by bit (pun) as much as could understand from Mike's patient replies.
ALL JPGS   at that time.
Then into the Raw era, and I learned and experimented and again, with Mike's guidance produced PRINTS better than anyone else, and still do.
Even friends who own 4900 and 3800 printers will ask me to print for them.

My long winded point is that I personally am like you. I have no use for the new plug ins. I had to Download a Trial Photo Shop for testing, but personally, have no use for the plug in.
I learned how to do up my raws, touch up a tad in the editor, add a mat or two for a final touch, a bit of text, and choose my printer setup for paper, profile, size, etc. and Print.

But other people have a different approach, and have been using PS for so long that they feel the same affinity for it as I do for Qimage.
For them, this plug in is just what they wanted for years.
It really works fine, and it sorts for you as well as the export and print in QU.

I have a professional photographer friend who uses Photo Shop, but prints only with Qimage. (He still shoots JPG, never tried raw) He works his images in PS and then they go to Qimage.  He thinks Santa came early this year, so you see the plug ins are manna from heaven for many.

Stay well,
Fred

I am glad others are of the same opinion.

Funny, this plug in release happens just when I have a couple of images that require extensive 'fiddling' as I call it.

I was commissioned to take some shots of presentation speaches, some thing I do not like.

Extensive post editing was required to get rid of background clutter.

Elements 7 to the resque, used so little that I had to re learn the thing, took two sessions of about two hours each.  First two hours just to learn the thing.

But then all I have to do is do a basic process in QImage save as .tiff then tart up in  Elements 7 save as .psd and reopen in qimage and then back on familiar ground.

A few minutes in Qimage and two and a half hours in Elements.

Jeff

   

That's too down market for me as well as being junk food! 
Terry

I was super excited to see the plugins announcement. But I quickly realized it won't help because I run QU on a Mac using Parallels (Qimage was the only reason that I bought Parallels!). Since my Lightroom license lets me install it also on a Win machine, I installed it in the Windows partition. But, strangely enough, the LR catalog (database, not the images) cannot be accessed from a network drive, and Parallels/Windows considers the Mac partition to be a network drive, I can run LR under Windows but cannot open the LR database. Oh well, I guess I'll continue to do what I have done for years - edit in LR/PS, and export images that I want to print. Then run QU to print.

I'm sure I'm not the only Mac user that keeps hoping for a Mac version of Qimage Ultimate, but I know that's not going to happen!

Thanks, Mike. The Windows installation in Parallels apparently sees any external drive shared with the Mac as a network drive so the LR catalog cannot reside there. I'll take a look at that article but I'll probably just keep doing what I've been doing for several years. Being able to use the plugins would be nice but no biggie if I can't.

 

[quote author=admin link=topic=3087.msg20858#msg20858 date=
What I was suggesting is that you copy the catalog from the external drive that is shared with the Mac onto a drive that is local to the Parallels/Windows installation, thereby copying it from that "network" drive onto the same drive as the LR installation on Windows is using.  Then run the Windows LR version after the catalog is copied.

Mike
[/quote]
Yes, that would work. I just prefer to work on the Mac version. It would be too cumbersome to try to keep the 2 versions in sync. It's really not a big deal to continue to export the files and then print them with QU. Thanks again.

Bart,

The only thing that would warrant reprinting anything is if you have any prints of 16 bit/channel photos that showed any faint banding in slowly changing gradients like skies or sunsets.  That's not likely since you have to have very specific conditions to create that condition in the first place and prior versions already mitigated that to a large degree.

I won't go into the technical details since I want to keep it proprietary but I'll just say that it's a way to manipulate the 8 bit/channel data going to your monitor and printer so that they can visually reproduce near 16 bit/channel color.  I'll leave you with two screen captures of the same 16 bit/channel gray gradient displayed in Photoshop and Qimage Ultimate:

Photoshop


Qimage Ultimate


Mike