Qimage not as warm as QTR

InkjetMall Customer Support Piezography Inks & Printing
1

I am using a 9890 with Piezo pro inks and Cone Type 5 paper. Printing with QTR I really like the warm tone and it is just what I was looking for, however I prefer the workflow of Qimage. I just loaded a fresh version of Ultimate and now have some profiles available for Piezography but now of them are as warm as QTR is. Anybody have a solution or profile? I realize I can do the imposition work in Qimage then output to QTR but I would rather print straight out of Qimage.

2

Not sure how Q-Image would change your warmth as the warmth is entirely determined by the sliders in the QuadtoneRIP driver (PrintTool and QiMage are just layout programs).

Most likely you are simply losing your last quadtoneRIP settings during your shift from PrintTool to QuadtoneRIP.

best
Walker

1 Like
3

Qimage is managing the color and printing to the Epson driver. There are several operating system level profiles available titled Piezography Pro. Are you saying I can use QTR as the driver? If so, then yes I agree this would take care of it. I am a Windows user.

4

Yes. On windows you can only use QTR. Install QTR and print with the qtrGUI app.

Please read the manual that comes with the community edition as well as look through our tech support landing page.

best,
Walker

5

If I switch to a Mac then I could use Qimage in combination with the QTR driver? They recently released a Mac version of Qimage.

6

Yes. In general Piezography is about 200% more supported on Mac.

  • You can print with ICC profiles.
  • You can print with QIMAGE, Lightroom, Print-Tool, etc.
  • You can easily print to networked and shared printers.
  • Etc.

best,
Walker

7

As a Windows QTR user and sometime Qimage user (and a very occasional Mac user) perhaps I can elaborate a little on Walker’s reply.

On a Mac, QTR installs as a printer. So you would see two 9890 printers - the physical one and a virtual QTR one. Given this, in theory you can print to QTR from any application. In practice, if you don’t want to print using ICCs, and many people don’t, then there are only a few programs that will enable you to do that and not have the OS do hidden color management. Print Tool is one such application, and I think that Qimage One for Mac now also does that.

On Windows QTR does not install as a printer. It’s a separate program with a GUI front end, QTRGui, that interacts directly with the printer, bypassing the Epson printer driver. So you have to print using that program. Qimage only prints to installed (physical) printers. If you’re printing using Qimage and a Piezo supplied ICC, then I guess you’re attempting to simulate the Piezo look, except that Qimage won’t know anything about the Piezo Pro inks and will be trying to do that with OEM inks, and what you actually get will be a roll of the dice.

It is possible to integrate Qimage and QTR, but the workflow is quite different. Some people prefer its on-the-fly resizing and sharpening algorithms. The workflow is you set Qimage to print to a file. In QTRGui you set all the options (paper size, curves) the way you want and then you set QTRGui to “monitor” a folder, the one that Qimage deposits its processed files into. When a new file appears there, QTRGui will print it automatically. This in effect mimics printing direct to a printer.

But last I looked Qimage didn’t handle monochrome ICCs. So if you want to print using a Piezo QTR ICC it needs to be an RGB ICC. If your images are in grey gamma 2.2, i.e. not RGB, then you need to turn colour management off in Qimage. It’s not as complicated as it sounds and I can elaborate further if you decide to go this path.

If you print via QTRGui and want to print using ICCs rather than in GG22, then you have to do the conversion to the ICC yourself in Photoshop and save it as a copy and print that. On a Mac using Print Tool, or perhaps Qimage One, you could specify the ICC as part of the print process. In that sense QTR is better supported on a Mac. Walker says that Piezo is 200% more supported on Mac, but the fact remains that there are plenty of people printing Piezo on Windows quite happily, yours truly included.

8

Thank you Brian for this informative and complete response. Yesterday, I decided to torture myself and install one of our mothballed Macs. I downloaded Print Tool and used that workflow successfully. I also installed the Qimage mac version but I have not printed with it yet, it is a scaled down version of Ultimate. We are a professional lab and have used Ultimate for years in our dye sub department. I love the ease of imposition creation as we have hundreds of sizes in that department, so filling a page was important. So, I was considering the integration as you suggested as well. Too bad the driver could not be integrated in the Windows version so it would work as it does on the Mac. I will continue to play with both environments and figure out which is more productive for my users. We are exclusively a pc production environment so I am concerned about my printer operators adapting to the Mac workflow.

Needless to say I went home with a headache yesterday, thou shalt not install and operated new software in both environments on the same day. Bourbon was the ultimate solution.

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9

You’re welcome. I tried to be reasonably complete, but was still far from encyclopaedic. No point filling in all the minute details unless you really need them.

As I understand it, Print Tool was created to solve the problem I alluded to above - being able to print without CM on recent versions of OS X. It does a little more than just that, and is a little like the Mac version of Qimage in that it can do resizing and page layouts on-the-fly without having to save a new version of the image or page just for printing. Which may be all you need.

However Qimage does more than that, and over the years has become a little like a photographic Swiss army knife. If your workflow relies on Qimage functionality that is missing from Print Tool, particularly its highly-regarded resizing and sharpening algorithms (no sharpening in PT AFAIK), and you want to print on OS X, then you may be better off with Qimage One for Mac. When it was first released, I gather it was just a bare-bones version, but last heard Mike Chaney and his Mac programmers were rapidly adding in functionality from Ultimate. Even so you would need to check that what you need is there now.

If you opt to use the no-CM workflow for printing to QTR, then you need to be aware than Qimage on Mac does this via what is know as a ‘null transform’. I’m not sure whether Print Tool also has to result to this workaround to avoid the traps of hidden CM performed by the OS X printing pipeline.

Turning to Windows, there’s a little more detail that I left out, but it rapidly gets technical. There were some challenges getting the Qimage and QTR workflow that I described to work with QTR-generated ICC profiles, and at one point Roy Harrington (QTR author) and Mike Chaney collaborated and it ended up with Roy creating a way to generate QTR ICCs specifically for use with Qimage. I don’t recall whether IJM-supplied ICCs have any Qimage-specific issues.

If you opt to go this route, and I suspect it makes most sense in your environment, I can do my best to recall all the quirks of this workflow, but since I don’t often use it myself you may do well to make contact with Ernst Dinkla. He has done most to promote the Qimage and QTRGui on Windows workflow. He doesn’t post here. You sometimes see him on Yahoo-QTR and more often on the Luminous Landscape printing forum. Perhaps also the large format printing forums.

In my view, the simplest route on Windows is to prepare your image for printing in Photoshop, and print via QTRGui. It works.