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Home >> Photography >> Digital Printing
Software - ACD Fotoslate When working within the digital darkroom world, printing your images is a natural omega to the alpha of your film scan or digital capture. Printing is offered by many applications including Photoshop, which has a number of printing options such as contact sheets and even package print templates; however, there are superior dedicated alternatives for printing. For most of my own family photo printing, I've been using Qimage Pro, now in 2003 guise.
Qimage 2003 offers a lot of features for the money ($40 US) and for Nikon digital photographers, Qimage can even act as a very good RAW NEF file converter. Qimage along with Bibble, were ahead of Nikon in allowing Nikon NEF shooters to be able to take full advantage of the D1x camera's native 4000 pixel horizontal resolution while interpolating the vertical resolution by two from the original 1300 pixels (give or take a few) to 2600. This allowed the D1x to offer 10 megapixel file sizes via Qimage and Bibble, although they are interpolated, but it was good enough for many to produce some good looking images beyond what the D1x offered straight out of the box. Nikon finally offered 10 MP interpolation of D1x files from its own Nikon Capture RAW converter in version 3.5. The major criticism of Qimage though is its user interface, which can be a bit cryptic and honestly, I never bothered to figure out how to convert my D100 NEF files through Qimage because I have most of the other high quality options available that are much more straightforward to use (Adobe RAW Converter, Phase Capture One, Bibble). The only major converter I don't have is Nikon Capture and I'll likely buy it sometime down the road, but right now I'm waiting to see if Nikon introduces Version 4 to go with the new D2H camera (update - yes they have). Some other annoyances with Qimage are templates that don't have a lot of flexibility to print both portrait and landscape images with the correct orientation. You can see the sample image below of a Qimage screen shot in which I have a portait and landscape image on the letter size print page (top right side of the screen shot). With the 4x6 template chosen, you can see that you do not have much choice for orientation. Perhaps 4x6 on letter size paper was not the best example to show for what I'm discussing, although it did serve to show how Qimage is laid out. Thumbnail images on the left side of the screen from your chosen folder and print lay out on the right. That part of Qimage is pretty straightforward. Various print size options are below the print layout and one can easily change paper sizes by clicking on the main Page menu option. Qimage talks to the Epson driver for my 1270 printer and I can select from all the paper choices available for the 1270. The screen shot below shows a print layout for the largest 13x19 paper size for the 1270 printer with 4x6 image sizes chosen again. Qimage allows you to fit images on a sheet paper to maximize the print space available, which you can see below as being six portrait oriented shots and two landscape shots at the bottom. The problem is that I still don't have the option of placing the portraits with the landscapes in the proper orientation - proper orientation meaning no need to turn the page sideways to see the images.
Qimage does allow for manual and freehand placment of images, but it just does not seem very flexible or easy to manipulate the images. In this digital age, I want to able to do what I want quickly and efficiently and having to study the user manual to figure things out is not cool. (Yes, I know, I know) Is there a better option than Qimage to orient images the way I want to, especially if I were to shoot a wedding or event digitally and want a nice clean layout for the proofs? Perhaps there is. ACD Fotoslate ACD is a local British Columbia company (I believe they are located in my suburb of Burnaby, which is actually quite a hi-tech mecca) that is best known for ACDSee, an image viewing application known for its fast loading of large image files. Although I have ACDSee, I do not use it on a regular basis because I have an even faster viewing application in NikonView 6. ACDSee can recognize D100 RAW files, but it loses a big feature in not having the larger viewing area in the lower side of the screen being used to full effect. Normally, for JPEGs and TIFFs, you have the folder contents on the main right side of the screen (below) and an enlarged view in the lower left side. RAW files show an image that is barely bigger than the thumbnails, thus ACDSee is far less effective for me.
NikonView 6 (screen shot below) is damn fast in loading thumbnail images of a folder and of course it recognizes NEF RAW files. It does not have the snazzy larger window view of a thumbnal, but that's covered off by second built-in application that provides the ability to view images at up to 800% file size. NikonView is comprised of the Nikon Browser, which acts as the thumbnail loader, then Nikon Viewer provides the magnified views and finally a basic RAW Nikon Editor allows the user to edit the RAW files before doing the major work in Photoshop and it's all free for Nikon digital photographers. And of course EXIF data is always available below the tool bar in any of the applications; however, it ain't no printing application, which takes us back to...
ACD Fotoslate, which is a $40 US purchase that is a standalone product to the ACDSee viewer. I played around with an earlier version Fotoslate last year, but never bothered to purchase it, but this year, given some of the more custom printing templates I'd like to work with, I'll be purchasing Fotoslate. Right now I've been playing around with the 30 day trial version to see if it was something I could use. There are some 450 templates available, but truthfully, I would expect that over 90% of them are useless for what I want out of a printing application. What I want is lots of variety in printing templates and that's where Fotoslate is still a bit short, as the basic templates included are for letter size prints and even so, there isn't quite enough variety for me. You can see some of the templates in the screen shots below. The first for portrait oriented templates and the second for landscape oriented sheets. Fotoslate allows you to display a number of pages at once (I suspect depending on your monitor size and resolution) with thumbnails from your folder displayed at left and the print layout on the main right side of the page.
Now Fotoslate is interesting just for the basic templates offered already, but it becomes a purchase for me thanks to the page design feature that allows me to create custom page layouts. Using an 11x17 inch sheet as an example with 4x6 inch prints as the set print size, I'll go over in very basic detail how to create a custom template. From the main Fotoslate toolbar:
Is Fotoslate perfect, no, with some workflow annoyances that I hope will be addressed in future versions. Fotoslate restricts you to always having to work with the same size papers and orientation for a particular project - no mixing and matching of paper sizes and landscape and portrait oriented sheets. I can live with no mixing and matching of sheet sizes, but not being able to work with landscape and portrait sheets makes it less versatile. However, the ability to create custom template pages for any given sheet size that your printer can handle makes it a superior application than Qimage. At this point in time, I would still be using both products, but I wouldn't be surprised if I end up using Fotoslate for the majority of my printing needs. Lastly, both Qimage and Fotoslate are color management capable, utilizing custom print profiles and taking advantage of monitor calibration profiles one creates with a spyder colorimeter. If your needs are basic and you don't need custom templates, Qimage is effective, but Fotoslates takes the printing application usability a notch higher. |
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