I’m wondering if there is any reason that one couldn’t use Qimage One for printing targets when linearizing Piezography Pro ink sets? Provided one is printing with color management turned off in Qimage One, would the output be any different than the output from Print Tool? I ask because I am linearizing for a new paper and I absentmindedly used Qimage One to print the first few targets and then switched to Print Tool halfway through the process.
TIA for any insight.
Hi Guy,
We do not know how Qimage One and Apple CM cooperate when color management is turned off. You can let us know by printing targets with both methods and measuring to see if there is a significant difference when the measurements are applied and viewed in Home Sheet of PPETv2. I hope that you will share with us!
Happy Thanksgiving
Rachel
IJM-TechSupport
I’m a little suspicious of Qimage One, but I am ignorant, so test for yourself…
If Qimage One uses Apple CM, and Apple CM uses an OS driver; and if Print Tool uses the QTR RIP and bypasses the Apple Driver, and the Qimage targets worked, you probably got lucky.
You could use the Qimage targets, then print new targets from Print Tool and rerun the linearizarion tool to see how well it worked.
If I have a new paper and print with a different paper setting, I go through two rounds to be sure of my results. If I am using a paper already linearized, I only go through one round.
Hi Mike, welcome to the community and thanks for your input. FYI, Qimage One can certainly be configured to use the QTR driver and additionally allows you to bypass Apple’s color management system. To test, I printed the same chart using Qimage One and Print Tool (256 patch chart), and upon measuring the results in i1Profiler with a i1Pro 2 spectro, the individual patch measurements were substantially the same with average deviations of between 0.3 to 0.5 (or lower). I feel this is well within acceptable tolerances for my system. I really don’t feel like there’s any particular magic to Print Tool as it simply bypasses color management. Any printing software that will allow the same should produce substantially identical results.
Ah, very good to know. I’m used to Print Tool.
Does Qimage bring up a dialog so you can set toning for Piezo Pro Inks?
Of course, it would be impossible to linearize for piezography if it didn’t. As far as I know, provided you have properly installed the QTR printer driver/rip on your system, that dialog can be accessed from any application that allows you to print. Bypassing the MacOS CMS may be another story however.
To be clear, I am using the Piezography Pro workflow, and historically I have always used Print Tool to print the targets. In this case, it was merely by accident that I had used Qimage One to print the targets as it had been several months since I have used the piezography workflow and I simply forgot to use Print Tool.
Personally, I usually need three rounds to arrive at a very linear output, but this is definitely paper and ink dependent. The cool curves tend to be the closest out of the box with my system, so sometimes I only need a single linearization pass to arrive at a perfectly straight, 45° line.
In any case, with Qimage One, you can turn off all system, printer and application color management and print with QTR in exactly the same way you can with Print Tool. However, Qimage One is a far more versatile and robust application than Print Tool, and so far it seems as though the output is identical when configured correctly. But I will continue to experiment and update this thread if I discover discrepancies.
Happy holidays!
Hi Guy
I’m interested in the idea of using Qimage One instead of Print Tool in the Piezography Pro workflow. Primarily what is attractive is the layout capabilities of Qimage when printing multiple files at the same time.
What caught my eye in your post above was “so far it seems as though the output is identical when configured correctly” Im curious as the what is “configured correctly”? Any tricks or tips to keep in mind when installing or setting up Qimage?
Thanks
Neil