The best Photo printing program! (Qimage Pro)

Member Name: startac_uk

Product:	Qimage Pro
Date:	10/05/01 (2559 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Ease of use, quality of printing, Free updates for life

Disadvantages: ICC technology still a little imature

Digital camera owners, before deciding whether Qimage Pro is for you, ask yourself one question. What do you want to do with your pictures? If your answer is that you want to manipulate the image and apply all sorts of special effects then please move along, this is not the program for you. If however you wish to print high quality prints with the minimum of fuss then this may just be what you are looking for.

Consider the shoot that I did this morning with my Nikon 990. I took several shots that I wanted to see in print so when I got home I put the compact flash card in my card reader and booted up my computer. I use Windows 2000 but this applies equally to Windows 98 as well.

I open Qimage and click on the button to move (or copy) the images from the card to a folder on my computer. Conveniently enough it also renames the files (if I want) while it does this, the file name then becomes the date and time the photo was taken.
When I close the dialog Qimage automatically shows the thumbnails of the images I have taken.

I select that I want some 4" x 5" prints and Qimage makes space for 4 on an A4 page. I then simply drag the ones that I want on to the template. As I know what preferences I want (colour balance, sharpness etc) from past experience, I have set up Qimage to apply a global filter to all images. If I like what I see I press print and a couple of minutes later I am holding the photographs in my hand. What could be simpler?

If you apply a global filter or alter the image in any way, by default, Qimage associates these filters with the original image and leaves your original intact.

If you are at all interested in digital photography, and use Microsoft Windows, I urge you to get hold of a copy of this program. It is available by downloading it from the Internet and is about 2.5mb in size. The cost is a measly $35 and all future upgrades are free. When I say upgrades you should know I
mean at least monthly, often weekly, sometimes daily! Not only that but Mike Chaney (the author) has an EGroup - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qimage -where he corresponds with users and upgrades his program based on what the users say.

Those of you with some technical expertise (or those that plan to acquire it) will be pleased to know that Qimage (like Photoshop) fully supports ICC profiles. This means that you give it a profile for your camera, monitor and printer and (in theory) the colours in the photograph you print looks as it did when you took the picture. I have had some difficulties implementing this but it appears that this is due to the profile for the particular paper I was using (Epson Premium Quality Glossy Paper), I have started using Epson Photo quality glossy film and the quality I am getting from my Epson 1270 is excellent. If you want ICC profiles for your Epson 1270 get them here - http://www.btinternet.com/~ian.lyons/epson1270/127 0profiles.zip

If you own a D1 (lucky you) then this program is a must buy, you get the NEF converter / decoder as part of the package. The quality of the output this combination is capable of is outstanding. For the rest of us we can still have some great prints straight out of the box and if we decide to try ICC profiles then we can buy a profile for the camera we use (from a limited range).

Overall an outstanding bargain and an outstanding program.

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