Digital BW, The Print

Thanks Christer, Peter, Bruce, and the others who have responded!  At 
the moment I have to stay with the fact that for me, Photoshop CS2 & 
Photokit Sharpener Pro seem to produce the best results for the size 
& type of printing I have been doing.  Having said that, I did get up 
this morning with a fresh outlook and set down to give Qimage another 
try.

I changed the "Interp" settings in Qimage from Pyramid-5 and 
experimented with the other settings.  For this same image I finally 
settled on Vector with a default (5) setting.  This produced an image 
that was better then my "Photoshop CS2 & Photokit Sharpener
Pro" 
method on parts of the image and not as good on other portions of the 
image.

It looks like the large number of setting options are something that 
I will have to do further experimenting with.  Some of the other 
abilities that Qimage has involving multiple images on a page and the 
ability to bypass Epson's limit of 44" print length are
things I 
could use if the sharpening issues can be resolved.

The one thing that I love about Photokit Sharpener Pro is its ability 
to selectively sharpen edges in only that part of the image that 
requires the enhancement.  I guess I will try an experiment to only 
sharpening in Photoshop/Photokit Sharpener the parts of an image that 
require the very most attention and do absolutely no other sharpening 
on the image.  Then open in Qimage to size and print.

I guess I am so used to having the ability to sharpen exact parts of 
an image to different degrees, I can't do with out it.

If someone out there uses Qimage regularly, can you tell me if Qimage 
has the ability to only apply sharpening to parts of an image or at 
least different levels of sharpening to different areas??  Thanks!

You know, I guess I am getting lazy in my old age but it sure seems 
that there should be a better way to learn a new piece of software 
then having to re-invent the wheel all over again.  I know I am not 
the first one to attempt this.

Bruce Varner
http://brucevarner.com/ 


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Christer 
Rosewelll <christerart@m...> wrote:
> Bruce,
> 
> I also have come to similar conclusions - I'm on Macs so don't use 
> Qimage or Shortcut Photozoomm but have Genuine Fractals (haven't 
used 
> it for years) but use Photokit Sharpener all the time.
> 
> I do follow the recommended workflow, do the Pre sharpening, the 
> Creative sharpening (after I've done all the other corrections I 
deem 
> necessary) and then after upsizing in Photoshop as the last step I 
use 
> the Output sharpener. For those of you not familiar with Photokit 
> Sharpener - the Output sharpener is applied as the last step before 
> printing and it applies sharpening depending on what kind of 
printer 
> you output to, matte or glossy paper and what resolution the file 
is 
> at.
> 
> I can't recommend this program enough - it is great - I've had, 
like 
> Scott Jones described in another post,  photographers and 
collectors 
> standing in front of my prints, begging me to tell them which ones 
of 
> the prints were film or digital - or if they were either... They 
simply 
> couldn't tell...
> 
> Christer