This interview was conduced by Andreas Jankowsky. Andreas owns a fine art printing service in Berlin, Germany. He uses Imageprint V6 for production printing

Imageprint, the well known RIP for photographers, goes into the next round. With the introduction of new fine art printers from HP and Canon, Imageprint V7 now will support also these new printers in addition to the proven Epson Ultrachrome printers. During PMA07 Andreas Jankowsky made an interview with John Pannozzo, president of Colorbyte Software about the new software and its features.

IP7 user interface

Andreas Jankowsky (AJ)

Announced a while ago, we are eagerly waiting fort he next release of the Imageprint RIP ­– and especially the support of new printers from HP and Canon. What took it so long?

John Pannozzo (JP)

We are almost ready with the new release of Imageprint V7. With the introduction of Windows Vista and the completely different architecture of the 32-bit- and 64-bit Versions of Vista we had to run extra tests for the software to run smoothly in all environments. Also, we invested some time in the fine-tuning of the new printers to deliver a complete and stable new release of Imageprint.

AJ

What has changed since version 6.0 ?

JP

We unified our software platform between different operating systems; Windows and OSX versions now look and feel the same. We cleaned-up and simplified the user-interface. It takes less windows and fewer clicks to set-up all features. All the available IP 6.0 profiles are fully compatible with the new version. We added support for the new printers from Hewlett-Packard and Canon, that use up to 12 inks. That made some extensions of our complex color rendering engine necessary.

Imageprint addresses a pretty wide field of different user requirements: The typical “fine art printer” concentrates on the high color fidelity of Imageprint, but doesn’t need many features; the wedding photographer needs perfect skin tones plus the workflow benefits of a RIP – easy positioning, printing of picture packages and automatic framing of pictures. We have extended and simplified these features.

Using the different margin-features of the printer has always been troublesome – we greatly improved this by showing the active margins clearly in the layout-view of Imageprint: borderless print, centered between printer-margins or centered on paper – all can be seen life in the preview and adjusted with just one click.

AJ

What are the newly added framing features ?

JP

Portrait or wedding photographers will love this feature, because it is simply a great productivity tool. The framing library adds a frame to the picture and you can freely position and scale the picture inside the frame; the dynamic picture package template easily prints pre-designed multi-picture packages and all customizing can simply saved as a new “style”

Imageprint profiling at Colorbyte Software

AJ

What are the features that are most interesting for us Fine Art Printers ?

JP

First you see the improvements in the user interface: pictures are easily placed, scaled and arranged via drag&drop. All color-corrections are adjusted via slider or numerically, making it easy to reproduce special corrections. The multilevel undo/redo allows for quick corrections and checks.

The list of Paper profiles now only presents the profiles corresponding to the active printer. The paper profiles we offer on our web site for free download are all generated with our proprietary profile generator. This software represents our extensive experience in profile generation for inkjet printers. However, all these profiles comply to the ICC standard and can be used for on-screen soft proofing with Photoshop. Only our gray-profiles, that are specially formulated for black&white prints that can be toned are proprietary and not suitable for soft proofing.

Those who make their own profiles can add the necessary tags for the printer set-up with third-party software like Colorthink.

Quite a big effort was taken for the color-rendering of the new 12-color printers from Canon and Hewlett-Packard. IP V7 makes a big step forward against the existing manufacturer printer drivers in terms of color-gamut, detail-rendering and smooth tone-gradation. In fact, the new generation of printers from HP and Canon are very sophisticated machines that are not yet fully controlled by its software. So we can expect more improvements just with more fine-tuning in the software algorithms.

AJ

And what makes Imageprint better than the drivers of the printer manufacturers?

JP

We are developing screening-algorithms for inkjets since the first generation of IRIS-printers. This experience is critical. It is important –for instance– to know exactly how a inkjet-dot looks on paper – the mathematics of dithering is based on ideally round-shaped dots. But this is not the reality – an Epson “dot” looks completely different from a HP-dot. Your color-rendering strategy must use this knowledge. This is one reason that explains why prints made with the Imageprint-RIP look much sharper than prints made with the manufacturers printer driver. They are not more sharpened. The extra sharpness (or better: the lesser reduction of sharpness) is a direct result of the sophisticated screening algorithm. So you only have to sharpen for the picture itself, not for the sharpness-reduction through the printing process.

If You think of the 12 inks to use for color reproduction, the different dot-sizes to place and up to 8 layers of different colored dots to reproduce a pixel in your picture-file You can imagine that only lots of experience and knowledge will generate perfect results.

Imageprint uses the built-in spectrophotometer in the HP printers to linearize the printer. This calibration assures very high color correctness with the pre-built IPV7 profiles available from Colorbytes FTP server.

AJ

What Fine Art Printer currently is the best on the market?

JP

You can’t answer this. All have its strengths and the user can decide which feature is most important to him. Epson is an absolutely proven design and has probably the best handling of thick paper. Canon's speed is amazing and with 60” its alone in its segment. HP shines with its great results using the gloss-enhancer and has a built-in spectrophotometer.

AJ

Thank You John.

A demo version of Imageprint for OSX and Windows is available at the companies web site www.colorbytesoftware.com