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"The technology assets of Pixmantec ApS have been acquired by Adobe"

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Alain Briot

Alain Briot

pro member
Winston said:
My question got hijacked so I'll have to repeat it:
Does/will LR support print-to-file with user selectable printer profiles?
Click to expand...

Yes, Lightroom Beta 3 lets you select any profile on your system. You can even build a list of your favorite profiles in Lightroom so that you don't have to wade through hundreds of arcane names each time. Very cool.
 
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Don Lashier

New member
scott kirkpatrick said:
But c'mon, guys. I am one of those that you are having such fun running down, (and I don't have the good sense to stay silent).
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Sorry Scott, not trying to run down anyone, just pointing out the lack of correlation between letters after the name and smarts. I myself come from an academic family - my dad was a physics professor and all three of my siblings have postgraduate degrees while I'm the family underachiever with only a bachelor's in math.
I think writing decent code to operate in a production mode has gotten quite separated from understanding how computers think. We teach object oriented program structure and scripting languages because certain concepts can be gotten across clearly that way. Some of our students graduate into the real world without ever actually needing to use their own code on any problem of significant size.
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That's a common criticism of a college education in general, in any field - it doesn't really prepare you for real world problems. In particular, (aptly named?) OOPS introduces an abstraction layer that further separates you from what's truly going on under the hood. IMO (and many "old timers") OOP, or at least in-appropriate use of OOP, has been a major contributer to code bloat and sluggishness of applications.

In the case I cited above, OOPS was not the issue as OOP was still largely an academic curiosity at the time. The issue was that the prof didn't truly understand what the algorithm was doing and coded it blindly from the theory book. It was a matrix operation (nested loops) and what he failed to realize was that all he cared about was the optimal result, not all the sub-optimal ones which he also calculated then discarded. Working the diagonal only is what permitted the dramatic enhancements. Elementary, and astounding that a prof who's consulting fee was 5x mine didn't see this (until two years later).

- DL
 
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Alain Briot

Alain Briot

pro member
Winston said:
Thanks Alain,

Just to clarify...does LR support printing to uninstalled printers (print-to-file)?
Click to expand...

I haven't seen it in LR Beta 3. Maybe in a later version. Something to suggest to Adobe if you want to.
 
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Michael Tapes

OPF Administrator/Moderator
Winston said:
My question got hijacked so I'll have to repeat it:
Does/will LR support print-to-file with user selectable printer profiles?
Click to expand...

Winston,

I took a look at the Mac beta and because i do not have a printer hooked up to my Mac at this time, I could not assign a print driver. I would suspect that this is an OS issue. If Mac normally allows print to file, then the answer is yes, but I am guessing. I suspect that Windows will also be subject to OS capabilities. Hopefully I will hook my mac to the network printer today and be able to answer your question.
 
Winston Mitchell

Winston Mitchell

Member
Michael Tapes said:
Winston,

I took a look at the Mac beta and because i do not have a printer hooked up to my Mac at this time, I could not assign a print driver. I would suspect that this is an OS issue. If Mac normally allows print to file, then the answer is yes, but I am guessing. I suspect that Windows will also be subject to OS capabilities. Hopefully I will hook my mac to the network printer today and be able to answer your question.
Click to expand...
It isn't an OS issue. Qimage does it by letting the user describe the output file. The user supplies canvas size, DPI, and the icc file used to filter the image on its way to the high-quality output JPG. The JPG is then lovingly transported to the destination printer where it is printed with "no corrections". Besides Qimage, it can also be done with Photoshop. More details at Dry Creek Photo.
 
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Don Lashier

New member
> It isn't an OS issue.

Well, it can be. You're correct that QI and PS both support "print to file", but in Windows anyway, a printer definition can be set up with file as the output rather than a physical (or virtual) port.

- DL
 
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Don Lashier

New member
> Why would or how could any operating system prevent a program from creating a jpeg?

Select "file" as the printer port, then print to that printer from the app. The app doesn't know it's actually going to a file.
printtofile.jpg


- DL
 
Andrew Rodney

Andrew Rodney

New member
Michael Tapes said:
Andrew,

I have spent a lot of time with Thomas and other Hi-level Adobe people this week, and I would say that based on my information and observations, you have this one wrong, but I understand why you say it..
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Well my "guess" that we will not see anything in 1.0 appears to be what Adobe said today:

Q: Lightroom is currently available only for the Mac platform, and RawShooter is available on Windows. Do you plan to turn RawShooter into your Windows version of Lightroom?

A: No. Our Windows version of Lightroom is already well under development and will be available as a public beta shortly. We will be taking the best technology in RawShooter and incorporating it into both the Mac and Windows versions of Lightroom, as well as into Adobe Camera Raw as it appears in Photoshop and other products. Incorporating RawShooter technology will take development time and may not be available within immediate versions of Lightroom. Customers who would like to be notified when the Windows beta of Lightroom becomes available should visit http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/ and click on the “sign up” link.
Click to expand...

This was found here:

http://photoshopnews.com/2006/07/11/adobe-posts-updated-faqs-regarding-purchase-of-pixmantic/
 
Andrew Rodney

Andrew Rodney

New member
Alain Briot said:
Yes, Lightroom Beta 3 lets you select any profile on your system. You can even build a list of your favorite profiles in Lightroom so that you don't have to wade through hundreds of arcane names each time. Very cool.
Click to expand...

I think the question however was, can you export this as a file for print. The answer is YES if it's a single rendered image and NO if you want to do this from the Print module. There's been a lot of discussions over on the beta forum about this. Many users want to use the Print templates to produce stuff for print but not send it to a printer hooked up to LR (rather, export a rendered TIFF to send to a lab). That's not possible although you can export this as a PDF (and RIP it in Photoshop). Unfortunately, many labs will not accept the PDF even though they should.
 
Andrew Rodney

Andrew Rodney

New member
Actually I stand corrected. You can't export a file in anything but the three supported RGB working spaces. You can on the Mac create a PDF of anything you can print. So if you want to output to a file in a output color space (not export), you're going to generate a PDF in that color space.
 
Alain Briot

Alain Briot

pro member
I think Michael is right. The print to file isn't necessarily part of the app. On the mac it is part of the printer driver. IP 6.1 has a direct print to file option though.
 
Winston Mitchell

Winston Mitchell

Member
Alain Briot said:
I think Michael is right. The print to file isn't necessarily part of the app. On the mac it is part of the printer driver. IP 6.1 has a direct print to file option though.
Click to expand...
Print-to-file has nothing to do with drivers. No driver is needed. All that is needed is the creation of a jpeg.
 
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Don Lashier

New member
Winston said:
Print-to-file has nothing to do with drivers. No driver is needed. All that is needed is the creation of a jpeg.
Click to expand...
You mean like convert to profile followed by save-as in Photoshop? Lightroom can't do this?

- DL
 
Andrew Rodney

Andrew Rodney

New member
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Don Lashier

New member
Andrew Rodney said:
That is correct. You can export an image in sRGB, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB OR print the image to your local printer using any ICC profile. Additionally you can export this as a PDF from the Print module.
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That's a rather stupid limitation. C1 and any number of raw converters can do this (output to any profile). It's got to be a trivial fix, the amazing thing is that the designers overlooked this.

- DL
 
Andrew Rodney

Andrew Rodney

New member
It's trivial unless you consider that to export a file in any color space, it's handy to be able to soft proof it first (otherwise, all kinds of surprises). The LR forum has a lot of users asking about soft proofing. It's certainly necessary before printing and for the same reason, rendering a file to any output color space. We don't have that now. I suspect Adobe is trying to keep a lot of functionality real simple. Consider the Customize Proof Setup in Photoshop and how you really need all this junk to effectively soft proof an image. And you really need to have this soft proof and the original side by side (again, something you can do in Photoshop since it supports multiple windows of the same file in any soft proof). That's adding a lot to the current product.

Should LR rendered a print package as a TIFF or JPEG? I think so. You can do this now as a PDF (with no soft proof). So in a way, the Print module in LR is two steps forward compared to Photoshop and one good step back. Least we forget, you can't print anything (or even soft proof) in ACR but then, its supposed to be used and go away, opening the image in Photoshop.
 
Winston Mitchell

Winston Mitchell

Member
Well, I gather from all this that the answer is no or maybe, sometime in the future. If, as an RSP refugee, I end up with lightroom, I'll do my printing with Qimage.
 
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Don Lashier

New member
Andrew Rodney said:
It's trivial unless you consider that to export a file in any color space, it's handy to be able to soft proof it first (otherwise, all kinds of surprises).
Click to expand...
But LR lets you print with any profile so there's the similar limitation of no softproof. Also for some of us printing to inkjets with good profiles from aRGB there are rarely any surprises. RSP, C1, and (I believe) Bibble all permit conversion on save and have no softproof and no one has every complained. Sure it would be nice but certainly not reason to leave a fundamental option out of a program of the class that LR claims to be? Perhaps this is actually an alpha?

- DL
 
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Dierk Haasis

pro member
Winston said:
Print-to-file has nothing to do with drivers.
Click to expand...

No, print-to-file does need a print driver. Because what you originally have done with this command is creating a print file which can be taken from one computer to another - say, from your office comp to a printing house -, fed into this one and print without the original application being on the comp.

Creating a JPEG or TIFF or even a FinePrint printing file is actually Exporting or Saving as ... with - in the case of QImage - filters and all applied. You still ned some image processing application, like IrfanView, to print it. Actually IV wouldn't do because it is not colour managed.

The last point shows that there is a huge and still applicable difference between a print file and an exported file; it's not just old DOS geekery-gee.
 
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Don Lashier

New member
Dierk Haasis said:
No, print-to-file does need a print driver. Because what you originally have done with this command is creating a print file which can be taken from one computer to another - say, from your office comp to a printing house -, fed into this one and print without the original application being on the comp.
Click to expand...

Well, there's obviously two ways of doing this and the two have become a bit confused in this thread because of imprecise use of terminology.

- a) If you're sending the file off to a printing service to be printed on a lightjet, fuji, or whatever, you want to output a file converted to the service supplied profile, but simply a jpg file or tiff in the printer colorspace. You likely don't even have a driver for the target printer installed on your computer.

-b) if you're going to send the file to another computer with a printer attached that you have the driver installed for on your computer, but the "other" computer doesn't have the app (eg PS) installed to load and output the image file, then you want to "print to file" using the appropriate driver so that you can simply ship the file to the other computer and then print.

The first option is probably the more common requirement and it's surprising that LR doesn't support this.

- DL
 
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