Digital BW, The Print

It could be a rough road I am heading for but I decided to skip the 
Adobe offer and look for alternatives. Wonder what others think about 
this move.

In short I have to learn RawTherapee. I use Qimage Ultimate as the base 
for anything including filing and set the external image editor to Raw 
Therapee. In many cases I can do the job from RAW/Tiff to print with 
Qimage. If more control in RAW is needed I transfer the RAW to 
RawTherapee. Do the job there and save a 16 bit Tiff back to the map 
Qimage has open. If I need Photoshop CS 5.5 editing features I can 
transfer the image to Photoshop with RawTherapee's external image editor 
setting and save a 16 bit Tiff to Qimage's file map.

RawTherapee gives me Flat Field for RAW  (bought Robin Meyer's 
Equalight-3 a month ago :-( and has a good base for deconvolution 
sharpening. Have to take Bart van der Wolf's optimising route in focus 
compensation and focus/lens characterising for best quality. Lens 
profiles from several sources are available that do not exist in 
Qimage's RAW processing. The 96 bit development in RT is in my view 
excellent for color control and geometric transformations. Both Qimage 
rely on DCRAW and LCMS-2 so that may reduce surprises. I can run RT on 
Windows and Ubuntu systems here.

For my own web/vector/sign/publishing needs I upgraded Xara Pro to its 
latest incarnation Xara Designer Pro 9. The program I always went for 
despite the installed Designer CS 5.5 package. Most what comes in from 
Illustrator or InDesign is PDF and can go through either the Z3200-PS 
route or get rasterized in Photoshop 5.5, the route I prefer to check 
colors and avoid font issues.


-- 
Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst Dinkla

http://www.pigment-print.com/spectralplots/spectrumviz_1.htm
December 2012: 500+ inkjet media paper white spectral plots.