Digital BW, The Print

Hello Peter,

>Your experience with Qimage, I believe, is unique. 
>I would really like to try the subject image on my machine and 
>print it. 
>I thought that all ink jet printers could only print 8 bit images, 
>but I could be mistaken.
>Clayton, with all due respect, I don't think you can judge a print 
>by viewing it on QIM's preview screen.

I appreciate your taking the time to respond to this.  I know many
people like Q very much and get great results with it.  As I mentioned
before, the few times I've gotten it to work ok the results have been
terrific.  However your remarks above make me think that you didn't
read my original message carefully.  I'm not trying to print with Q,
and I'm not judging a print by viewing it on the Qimg screen.

What I'm doing is upsizing a 1.2 mp file to 8mp so that I can make a
larger print.  I'm using Q's "Print To File" simply for upsizing.  I
have already converted the file to 16-bit grayscale and done
much of the work using my normal methods.  I send it to Q for upsizing
and get back an 8-bit RGB file that is less sharp than my PS/bicubic
version plus has the hatch marks and sharpening halos.  So...why bother.

You gave me an idea though, and I just tried upsizing the original RGB
color file before BW conversion.  I thought maybe it would do a better
job with that.  But...the hatch marks are still there.  Perhaps it's
the Print To File that's causing it, or maybe because it's such a
large jump from 1.2 to 8 mp...I don't know.  For whatever reason, the
PS/bic is giving a result I didn't think would be possible (I first
did it just to see what would happen and was stunned at the quality it
produced).  

I have found 8 or 10 of these low-res images that are worth working up
(for some strange reason I didn't take them with the big camera-
-duh!).  I've done four of them so far using this method and I'm
getting very satisfactory 8" prints.  These are now on my
web site if you are interested in seeing why I'm going to the trouble,
I really like the images.  Here's a link

      http://www.cjcom.net/cal05-a.htm

There are five pics here, all but the middle one ("Dune Study #1") are
the low res ones.  The dark one, "Morning On The Dunes", was the
original one I first tried this on.

Back to Q, I agree that it does a superior job of printing whenever it
can read the file.  But often it cannot.  It's usually files that have
had lots of layers and selections, which is most of the time on my
serious work.  It's weird because some of those files it can read,
while others it can't.  I haven't detected a pattern yet as to what
might be causing it.  Bottom line for me unfortunately is it's not a
tool I can count on.  I wish that weren't the case and I hope someday
it will be better.  That's why I keep going back to it now and then.

Regards,
Clayton


Info on black and white digital printing at    
http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm