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Author Topic: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience  (Read 5200 times)

unesco

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #20 on: December 23, 2018, 07:05:23 am »

ImagePrint is still using the Canon driver on Canon printers? Then, what's it really doing? Its claim to fame has always been three things, as I understood it:

1.) Really good profiles (still valid even if using the Canon driver, but at least one user here wasn't impressed with how well they profile Canons).
I do not fully agree with this, at least within my experience and printers I have been using it (Epson 3880 and P800).
Profiles are far from ideal, with number of color inaccuracies including "blue turns violet" shift known for years and severe problems with deep blues. As for B&W, I can achieve much better results with QTR on OEM inks. Just my 2 cents.
I wonder how it looks (will) for Canons...
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John Caldwell

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #21 on: December 23, 2018, 05:16:16 pm »

Out of ignorance, what is Q Image popular at this time? Since LR's Print module is as good as it is, and since most users will still prefer a custom ICC profile for their chosen paper, how is Q Image useful in 2018?
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Panagiotis

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #22 on: December 23, 2018, 05:18:34 pm »

Out of ignorance, what is Q Image popular at this time? Since LR's Print module is as good as it is, and since most users will still prefer a custom ICC profile for their chosen paper, how is Q Image useful in 2018?
Imageprint is not Qimage

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John Caldwell

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #23 on: December 23, 2018, 05:20:50 pm »

Sorry, embarrassed to have not paid greater attention. Suppose my question was posed for Imageprint? The same question does come to my mind, again out of ignorance.


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Panagiotis

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #24 on: December 23, 2018, 06:19:44 pm »

No problem :). I have no idea about ImagePrint but I watch this thread and anything related to the Canon wide format printers. As for Qimage I find it  very useful.
Sorry, embarrassed to have not paid greater attention. Suppose my question was posed for Imageprint? The same question does come to my mind, again out of ignorance.


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biswas_arup

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #25 on: December 24, 2018, 07:45:48 pm »

I did some more comparison of modified Bill Atkinson target on Hahnemuhle fine art Baryta Satin paper. I printed the target using Hahnemuhle provided ICC profile as well as Imageprint-provided ICC profile. Here is the summarry of my observations:

- Hahnemuhle ICC profile shows more accurate skin tones than Imageprint profile
- Hahnemuhle ICC profile shows better saturation in reds than Imageprint profile
- However, Imageprint profile shows better gray tone seperation than Hahnemuhle profile

The above three observations are in line with Canson and Imageprint profiles comparison results. However, the Canson profiles shows little more saturated reds and better skin tones than Hahnemuhle profile. I am guessing  this is because Canson provides custom media setting files to control the ink behavior, but Hahnemuhle uses Canon media, which possibly does not exactly match with their paper characteristics.
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Panagiotis

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #26 on: December 25, 2018, 04:57:33 am »

I did some more comparison of modified Bill Atkinson target on Hahnemuhle fine art Baryta Satin paper. I printed the target using Hahnemuhle provided ICC profile as well as Imageprint-provided ICC profile. Here is the summarry of my observations:

- Hahnemuhle ICC profile shows more accurate skin tones than Imageprint profile
- Hahnemuhle ICC profile shows better saturation in reds than Imageprint profile
- However, Imageprint profile shows better gray tone seperation than Hahnemuhle profile

The above three observations are in line with Canson and Imageprint profiles comparison results. However, the Canson profiles shows little more saturated reds and better skin tones than Hahnemuhle profile. I am guessing  this is because Canson provides custom media setting files to control the ink behavior, but Hahnemuhle uses Canon media, which possibly does not exactly match with their paper characteristics.

I suggest to build a custom profile for your favorite paper and compare. I do not have experience yet with my new PRO-4000 but I have printed a lot with the PRO-1000 and the custom profiles I ordered are better than the Canson profiles and way better than the Hahnemuhle profiles.

If you go this route don't forget to print the profiling targets with the Canon PSP plugin (with no color correction) as Mark Segal suggested in his PRO-2000 review.
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biswas_arup

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #27 on: December 25, 2018, 03:11:49 pm »

I suggest to build a custom profile for your favorite paper and compare. I do not have experience yet with my new PRO-4000 but I have printed a lot with the PRO-1000 and the custom profiles I ordered are better than the Canson profiles and way better than the Hahnemuhle profiles.

If you go this route don't forget to print the profiling targets with the Canon PSP plugin (with no color correction) as Mark Segal suggested in his PRO-2000 review.

I am working with Imageprint in the hope that they can improve their profiles for Canson and eventually Hahnemuhle. They have been cooperating so far. I have already spent over $2000 on two versions of Imageprint. I think they should make better profiles for that kind of money. That would be good for their business too!
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John Caldwell

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #28 on: December 25, 2018, 08:44:37 pm »

Asking out if ignorance: Why spend a few hundred dollars for IP, maybe more, when printing from LR is as good as it is, and a good custom profile is less than $50?


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Dan Wells

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #29 on: December 25, 2018, 10:38:14 pm »

As far as I can tell, ImagePrint gained a lot of their fan base when they were far and away the best thing on the market (Lightroom having a really good printing engine is comparatively recent). Trying to get a print to look good out of Photoshop 6 (NOT CS 6 - just Photoshop 6) was a real art, and it was never entirely satisfactory. That was (roughly) when IP showed up. IP has improved, of course, but Adobe has put a ton of money into their print engine, such that the differences are much smaller than they once were.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #30 on: December 26, 2018, 08:08:03 am »

As far as I can tell, ImagePrint ...........

Could you elaborate on how you are able to tell? Have you compared the printing of printer evaluation targets from the same printer, same size using ImagePrint versus Lightroom or Photoshop within the past couple of years? What were your findings?
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #31 on: December 26, 2018, 08:12:40 am »

I am working with Imageprint in the hope that they can improve their profiles for Canson and eventually Hahnemuhle. They have been cooperating so far. I have already spent over $2000 on two versions of Imageprint. I think they should make better profiles for that kind of money. That would be good for their business too!

Hi Arup, $2000 is a really substantial investment in printing software. As you have been a user and obviously tried other approaches, I'd be interested to hear more about whether you thought you got your money's worth, and what incremental advantages you either anticipated or achieved by opting for ImagePrint. Basically, I'm asking a very similar question to John Caldwell's.

Full disclosure: as of now I am not an ImagePrint user, so I'm interested in learning of other members' first hand experience, if it has any rigour.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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biswas_arup

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #32 on: December 26, 2018, 09:58:58 pm »

Hi Arup, $2000 is a really substantial investment in printing software. As you have been a user and obviously tried other approaches, I'd be interested to hear more about whether you thought you got your money's worth, and what incremental advantages you either anticipated or achieved by opting for ImagePrint. Basically, I'm asking a very similar question to John Caldwell's.

Full disclosure: as of now I am not an ImagePrint user, so I'm interested in learning of other members' first hand experience, if it has any rigour.

I first purchased Imageprint 9 in 2013 for my Epson 7900 printer because of the following reasons:

- It provided better icc profiles than other canned icc profiles from Epson and media vendors like canson
- It provided consistency across various papers
- It provided excellent icc profiles for Black and White printing
- The UI for IP was very simple and elegant compared to the Epson printer driver

Then I had to upgrade to Imageprint 10 in 2017, when I replaced my printer with a Epson SC-p7000, as IP 9 did not support the new printer.
Unfortunately, IP 10 did drop the support for Black and white profiles. Now, they have added the Black and White profile support in their new version, Imageprint Black for another $500 upgrade.

If I need to make the decision once again, I would say it would not make sense for an Individual Fine Art photographer printing in just color. It might make sense for  someone printing in Black and White. It might also make sense for a print shop making use of their layout manager and the need for printing across dozens of media.
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Dan Wells

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #33 on: December 27, 2018, 02:13:31 am »

I haven't used ImagePrint in a while - I've been printing on Canon recently, currently a Pro-2000, and highly satisfied with what I get out of Lightroom, especially with Canson papers that have the custom media configurations.

 I haven't tested the same Canson paper with and without the custom configuration file. The only fair way to do that would be if I owned high-end profiling hardware. The Canson profile is made assuming the custom media settings, so using it with a Canon media setting would be a mismatch. I HAVE tested Canson Platine (my present favorite) against comparable papers (notably Hahnemuhle FineArt Baryta and PhotoRag Baryta) that use a Canon media profile, and I like the prints on Platine better on just about every image (it's subtle, but it's there). I don't know if this is "Platine is more to my tastes" or "the media configuration makes a difference"?

When I DID use ImagePrint was years ago, printing from Photoshop to older 17" Epsons (it was once fairly reasonably priced for 17" printers and below), and it certainly made a difference then! It was night and day, whether against paper manufacturer profiles or what I was able to create with a (fairly early) ColorMunki or a borrowed iOne Pro (original). I went to Canon when I bought my first 24" printer, a Canon iPF 6100, and there was no IP for that printer. I've owned one Epson (a 7900) since then, and I didn't buy IP for it because it was so expensive that I decided to try straight from Lightroom first - I got excellent results, and that's been my workflow since.

I have continued to read IP reviews and look at samples when I get the chance, and I haven't seen anything to suggest that it has the kind of advantages it had back when I used it regularly - IP hasn't gotten worse, but other ways of printing have gotten a lot better. I took a good look at samples about 5 years ago, when I bought the Epson 7900, since I could have had ImagePrint for that (for a king's ransom). I didn't see a huge difference then, even in samples ColorByte (makers of ImagePrint) provided. The prints were certainly subtly different, but I sometimes preferred Lightroom, other times ImagePrint - it wasn't like it had been several years earlier, when ImagePrint won on every image, and it was often not subtle.

I have never used QImage on my own systems - I'm a 34 year Mac user (my first Mac was an original 128K) who's rarely had anything else, and I'm happy enough with Lightroom's print module these days that I haven't yet found time to experiment with the very recent Mac version of what's always been a PC-only program. I have used QImage occasionally on other people's systems, and, like ImagePrint, my impression has been "you can get a lot closer in Lightroom than used to be the case".

One of the real tricks that both IP and QImage do that used to be tough to get the Adobe stuff to do natively is output resizing. Both of them resize (and handle output sharpening) on the fly with fairly sophisticated algorithms... Photoshop has always had various resizing algorithms, of course, but they involved saving versions of the image at every size you wanted to print. Lightroom has always had a resize and output sharpen on the fly feature, but it used to be unsophisticated - not much better than letting the printer driver do it (printer drivers just do a nearest neighbor resize - old Lightroom may have been one step better - was it bilinear?).

A few versions back, Adobe bought the PixelGenius resizing and output sharpening technology and added it to Lightroom. They don't offer much control, but the algorithms are excellent. At least in my opinion, it was the addition of PixelGenius technology that made "just do it all in Lightroom" a viable fine-art workflow. Jeff Schewe, one of the brains behind PixelGenius, used to frequent this forum. Once Canon added the custom media types, and paper manufacturers started picking up on that, the number of tricks third-party software had that the basic tools didn't declined again.

That's not to say that a third-party program couldn't do the same things (resizing, output sharpening and custom ink management) better - but they are no longer doing things Lightroom and Canon's driver just don't do the way they used to...
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Panagiotis

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #34 on: December 27, 2018, 02:49:46 am »

Concerning Canon PRO line printers. Using a standard media type (Hahnemuhle) instead a custom media type (Canson) to build an icc profile doesn't mean that the first profile is going to be inferior or that a custom media type is better than a standard one. On the contrary there are indications that standard media types like Pro Platinum and Pro Luster for example have characteristics (chroma optimizer application in "Auto" mode) that cannot be replicated with a custom one because one cannot create a custom media type using as a base media Pro Platinum or Pro Luster. Also from my limited investigation I came to the preliminary conclusion that media types contain ink mixing "recipes". So coming back closer to the subject of the thread I believe that Canson profiles seem better than Hahnemuhle profiles because Canson seem to have build them better. In any case these profiles must be used in conjunction with the media types used to create them.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #35 on: December 27, 2018, 08:37:11 am »

I haven't used ImagePrint in a while - I've been printing on Canon recently, currently a Pro-2000, and highly satisfied with what I get out of Lightroom, especially with Canson papers that have the custom media configurations................

.............. I've owned one Epson (a 7900) since then, and I didn't buy IP for it because it was so expensive that I decided to try straight from Lightroom first - I got excellent results, and that's been my workflow since.

...............IP hasn't gotten worse, but other ways of printing have gotten a lot better. I took a good look at samples about 5 years ago, when I bought the Epson 7900, since I could have had ImagePrint for that (for a king's ransom). I didn't see a huge difference then, even in samples ColorByte (makers of ImagePrint) provided. ..............

 I have used QImage occasionally on other people's systems, and, like ImagePrint, my impression has been "you can get a lot closer in Lightroom than used to be the case".

.....................

A few versions back, Adobe bought the PixelGenius resizing and output sharpening technology and added it to Lightroom. They don't offer much control, but the algorithms are excellent. ........................


Those are interesting and useful observations Dan, thanks.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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D White

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #36 on: December 31, 2018, 01:49:11 pm »

Prompted from the discussions here, I did contact imageprint.

They did confirm the following;

"We talk to the printer through the driver without actually using it.  It’s kind of complicated and a method we originally thought could cut down development time and get the drivers out faster as we didn’t have to do all the communication side of things (Mac and Windows).  As it turned out we weren’t very happy with the technical aspects of it as not every printer shares the same command set so it was a lot more headache than we originally thought it would be.  We have all new Canon drivers almost ready to go that will have our brand new Narrow Gamut B/W technology.  We are in beta with the B/W right now on the Epson P Series and should be rolling that out in the first week of January and then the Canon Pro Series."

I am a very recent convert to Imageprint for my pro-2000. It was a toss as to the same money for a spectro and then all the associated learning curves vs Imageprint and tapping into their much greater experience in making profiles. I would speculate that the creation of a profile has a good deal of art and not just science and that I would burn a lot of time and energy trying to master it.

When compared to canned profiles from Canon, Canson, Moab, the image print gave subtle but important improvements to shadow separation, micro contrast in saturated colors, along with some increasing in saturation that did not effect detail and tone separation.

But it was also nice to see that my previous work on canned profiles was not garbage and at first glance matched closely.

So with my limited experience to some here, Imageprint gave subtle but important improvements, consistently with various paper types within the limitations of PK/MK, and a user interface that is more sophisticated and targeted at the job of printing.
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Dr D White DDS BSc

biswas_arup

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #37 on: January 26, 2019, 09:36:51 pm »

I suggest to build a custom profile for your favorite paper and compare. I do not have experience yet with my new PRO-4000 but I have printed a lot with the PRO-1000 and the custom profiles I ordered are better than the Canson profiles and way better than the Hahnemuhle profiles.

If you go this route don't forget to print the profiling targets with the Canon PSP plugin (with no color correction) as Mark Segal suggested in his PRO-2000 review.

I am thinking of getting  custom profile(s) built for comparison. Could I ask you which profile service did you use for the custom profiles?
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MT

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #38 on: January 29, 2019, 07:21:15 am »

I find this topic to be touching a little bit of what problems I had with my Pro 4000 and Canson papers.
For me, printing with provided by Canson am1x files was catastrophe, leading to strong dithering and visible dots over color patches.

After receiving Hahnemuhle papers, and printing following their instruction - Canon HW Fine Art as media - prints were amazing.

Went back to Canson and printed on Canson using HW Fine Art media - results are a lot better than with provided am1x
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Panagiotis

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Re: Image Print 10 for Canon PRO-2000: personal experience
« Reply #39 on: January 29, 2019, 08:18:15 am »

Went back to Canson and printed on Canson using HW Fine Art media - results are a lot better than with provided am1x

Just out of curiosity. What is the base media paper type that Canson uses in it's am1x settings? You can check that with the Canon Media Configuration tool.
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