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Author Topic: Poor experience with Qimage  (Read 2479 times)

Damon Lynch

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Poor experience with Qimage
« on: January 11, 2018, 12:55:04 pm »

I'm seeing inconsistent output from Qimage, in the sense that many but not all color prints from my Canon Pro 1000 to Canon's SG-201 semi-gloss paper have a strong red / pink cast. The bizarre thing is that I'm not changing any settings, but nonetheless the Qimage output is sometimes correct and sometimes not. This is a recent problem, i.e. within the last month or two. Qimage used to print just fine.

Black and white prints are unaffected.

It's hard to have confidence in a program whose output is inconsistent like this. I don't know if the problem is caused by a bug in Qimage, or in the context in which Qimage runs (i.e. Windows 10, or the print driver Qimage interacts with). Of course it could conceivably be a hardware problem unique to my system too. Either way, if LR outputs the correct print, the question in my mind is why introduce added complexity into the workflow that increase the possibility of these strange and difficult to diagnose bugs popping up? I haven't printed much from LR -- given I had Qimage -- but thus far every LR print has been correct. I plan to print only from LR in future, and if it doesn't give me any problems from here on in, I anticipate I'll just stick with it, and abandon Qimage.

If per chance in future LR should also produce prints with cast, I'll update this post. It's not a good feeling to undermine a program made by a single developer who has worked so hard on his project. However this is my experience with it, unfortunately.
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #1 on: January 11, 2018, 01:19:54 pm »

I'm seeing inconsistent output from Qimage, in the sense that many but not all color prints from my Canon Pro 1000 to Canon's SG-201 semi-gloss paper have a strong red / pink cast. The bizarre thing is that I'm not changing any settings, but nonetheless the Qimage output is sometimes correct and sometimes not. This is a recent problem, i.e. within the last month or two. Qimage used to print just fine.

Hi Damon,

Hard for us to diagnose your setup. Have you contacted Mike Chaney (http://ddisoftware.com/tech/qimage-ultimate/)?
If there are other reports of this being a Qimage issue, I'm sure he would like to know it, in order to correct it.

Qimage Ultimate hasn't been updated since Nov 15th (Mike is too busy with the to-be-released Mac version) so if it is a bug, it's been there for quite some time for others to experience as well.

Cheers,
Bart
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Damon Lynch

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #2 on: January 11, 2018, 01:30:27 pm »

Hi Bart,

Yes I did report it on the Qimage forums. I went through their suggestions, except the one for letting the printer manage the color. At this point I've lost too many sheets of paper to want to try something that I'll never use.

Clearly a print workflow is a highly complex system with many variables. If only one is wrong, then the output can be bad.

Damon
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deanwork

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #3 on: January 11, 2018, 01:42:24 pm »

Since all is fine with Lightroom I guess you can rule out a Canon driver color management problem.





Hi Bart,

Yes I did report it on the Qimage forums. I went through their suggestions, except the one for letting the printer manage the color. At this point I've lost too many sheets of paper to want to try something that I'll never use.

Clearly a print workflow is a highly complex system with many variables. If only one is wrong, then the output can be bad.

Damon
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Ernst Dinkla

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #4 on: January 11, 2018, 02:56:46 pm »

Hi Bart,

Yes I did report it on the Qimage forums. I went through their suggestions, except the one for letting the printer manage the color. At this point I've lost too many sheets of paper to want to try something that I'll never use.

Clearly a print workflow is a highly complex system with many variables. If only one is wrong, then the output can be bad.

Damon

When issues like that happen and the problem is caused by Qimage itself it is usually solved by resetting the driver to its default from within Qimage, then rebuild the driver settings again in the driver. At least that is the remedy I have used when I had similar problems. The interactive log where jobs can be recalled is absolutely nice but if you recall jobs that have been made before a Windows hickup made a new driver install necessary you can face odd things like that. I usually recall the job then but read the description and reset the driver to default and manually make driver settings again.

Ernst, op de lei getypt.
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Abdo

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #5 on: January 12, 2018, 07:01:32 am »

here comes that question

why print on QImage? What advantage does it offer over LR?

Panagiotis

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #6 on: January 12, 2018, 07:25:22 am »

here comes that question

why print on QImage? What advantage does it offer over LR?
It's much easier than LR to place multiple images in the same sheet especially when the images have borders were borders can be set to mm and not only to pt like LR.

EDIT: Generally when you understand it's logic it's much easier to work with Qimage than LR Picture Package or Custom Package layout modes.
« Last Edit: January 12, 2018, 07:29:49 am by Panagiotis »
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Kevin Gallagher

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #7 on: January 12, 2018, 07:55:00 am »

It's much easier than LR to place multiple images in the same sheet especially when the images have borders were borders can be set to mm and not only to pt like LR.

EDIT: Generally when you understand it's logic it's much easier to work with Qimage than LR Picture Package or Custom Package layout modes.

 So agree on this point and now that Qimage is being made available for OSX I can get rid of Parallels and Windows on my iMac as not having it to use on OSX was a no go for me. BTW, this is NOT intended to ignite a PC Vs. MAC debate, just trying to illustrate how necessary Qimage is to my particular workflow.
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Abdo

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #8 on: January 12, 2018, 08:37:51 am »

I've never been interested in using QImage because it only has Windows.
Besides that I find the interface very bad.
Install Paralles just for this .. never liked ..
Who knows now with MAC version, improve the interface.

Any news of when it will be available?

Ernst Dinkla

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #9 on: January 12, 2018, 09:00:05 am »

When issues like that happen and the problem is caused by Qimage itself it is usually solved by resetting the driver to its default from within Qimage, then rebuild the driver settings again in the driver. At least that is the remedy I have used when I had similar problems. The interactive log where jobs can be recalled is absolutely nice but if you recall jobs that have been made before a Windows hickup made a new driver install necessary you can face odd things like that. I usually recall the job then but read the description and reset the driver to default and manually make driver settings again.

Ernst, op de lei getypt.

I see that this remedy already was recommended in the Qimage Ultimate forum, maybe differently phrased. You considered this solution as a flaw as well compared to Lightroom's interactions with the printer driver. In the thread it is explained that the interaction of QU with the driver goes further than what Lightroom has and by that QU is more affected by driver issues. Yesterday Mike gave a reply to explain more and also indicated that there are Canon driver issues, within the last three W10 updates. Which he reported to MS and should be fixed by them end of January. I guess there is more fixing done now at MS on the Intel CPUs issues so add some slack to that date.

Will you get an answer as fast and as transparent from Adobe with a complaint like that?  I think you need a lot more patience there before you get a reply, a temporary solution and one that solves it definitely.  That is one of the virtues of a small company dedicated to its software and its customers.  I stick to Qimage like I have done for about 15 years.

http://ddisoftware.com/tech/qimage-ultimate/canon-imageprograf-pro-1000-redpink-tint/15/

Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst

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Kevin Gallagher

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #10 on: January 12, 2018, 09:05:04 am »


Install Paralles just for this .. never liked ..
Who knows now with MAC version, improve the interface.

Any news of when it will be available?
[/quote]

Supposedly sometime this month :)

Kevin in CT
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Kevin In CT
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Damon Lynch

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Re: Poor experience with Qimage
« Reply #11 on: January 12, 2018, 02:48:49 pm »

I see that this remedy already was recommended in the Qimage Ultimate forum, maybe differently phrased.

You mean the instructions after they told me to stop using ProPhotoRGB, to print only with the highest quality print setting, and to run an (unnecessary) nozzle clean, and that they were out of ideas to help? At no point did the replies say "the problem is within Qimage itself". Had they told me from the outset the steps that you suggest, i.e. resetting everything to zero and starting again, the problem potentially could have been solved immediately.

You considered this solution as a flaw as well compared to Lightroom's interactions with the printer driver. In the thread it is explained that the interaction of QU with the driver goes further than what Lightroom has and by that QU is more affected by driver issues.

It's not clear to me what Qimage gains from its tighter integration with the printer driver compared to Adobe's approach. Is it really worth it? Obviously there is a cost to the tighter integration, which is that prints can come out wrong without any warning.

What's interesting in this case is that the problem reared its head before I updated the printer driver. So there is more to the underlying problem than just that.

Will you get an answer as fast and as transparent from Adobe with a complaint like that?

I agree their replies are extremely fast, and that's fantastic and a huge benefit to using it. But I don't see them being particularly transparent in this instance. Instead the emphasis in their replies was what was potentially wrong with everything but Qimage -- even how I store paper. It's a shame they didn't simply say right away to reset everything and start again, in line with your experience.

I stick to Qimage like I have done for about 15 years.

I'm happy it works for you and no doubt for countless others, and I hope it continues to do so in the years to come. Producing a wonderful print is magic and enormously satisfying.
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