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HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME Nothing comes close to what this program does. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Qimage Pro: Essential software for printing images in WindowsApril 7, 2002 By Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard Quick quiz: What's the easiest way to print six digital photos on a single sheet of inkjet paper? You won't have to wait long for the answer. But let me tease you a little more: What's the best way to print 16 pictures on a single sheet? Or 64? What's the easiest way to control the balance of colors and sharpness when you print your digital photos? The answer is Qimage Pro, a program from a small company called Digital Domain. I consider Qimage Pro absolutely essential for printing the images I've scanned and the pictures I've taken with my digital cameras. Qimage Pro is for Windows only --I'll report on Macintosh printing software later this year -- and costs only $35. Try it for free from www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/. The software is updated often, and upgrades are always free. Qimage Pro lets you control every aspect of the way your images are printed. I was overjoyed the first time I tried Qimage Pro when I discovered I could make my pictures any size I wanted, without regard to esoteric "dots per inch" requirements. I was just as thrilled when I found out I could fine-tune a dozen different aspects of the way my photos printed, from the color accuracy of the prints to the size of the margins, from minor touchups (removing blemishes and overly bright pixels) to major surgery (cropping out portions of my pictures that don't look good). Qimage Pro is a separate program, not some sort of printer driver. It doesn't care what kind of printer you have and it runs by itself, not as part of another program. I've set it up so that it looks in specific folders for images to print. I simply copy images I want to print into that folder and run Qimage Pro. If you're used to printing from your favorite image editor, you might find Qimage Pro a little daunting. After all, what's wrong with simply printing from Photo Deluxe or any other image editing program? What's wrong will be apparent as soon as you start using Qimage Pro. Nothing comes close to what this program does. You can print multiple images per page, of any size -- I tried 120 per page and got incredibly sharp results for all the tiny images -- and you can crop, rotate, sharpen, apply unsharp masking, remove blemishes, adjust for "hot" image sensors and do a dozen other operations on images before they are printed. Qimage Pro automatically stores the parameters for each image adjustment in a separate file kept in the image folder, so that you'll get your careful adjustments each time you print the image. This also means that Qimage Pro never manipulates the actual image file; it applies the changes to a temporary file that it prints, then saves the "delta" for future reference. (If you want to, you can have Qimage apply the changes directly to the image. But never do this if you are working with JPEGs (also called JPGs); do it only on lossless images. They're TIFFs (or TIFs), BMPs, PNGs or PSDs.) Qimage Pro is especially good at trouncing the myth that digital photos have to meet a requirement of a certain number of "dots per inch" before they can be printed for home use. Just drag your image from one part of the Qimage window to the virtual page where you set up the print size and that's that. (And tell any so-called "expert" who talks about dots per inch to fly a kite -- politely, of course.) Next: Stars/Technofile Digital Photo Contest winners. |