[Gimp-print-devel] Photo quality glossy film

[Robert L K. <rl...@al...>]

I tried playing around with some of this recently (my wife and I want
to make a print from one of our wedding photos).  It's really nice
stuff.

The print characteristics are quite different from anything else, and
it takes rather different printer settings to work properly.  Most
importantly, it must be printed very slowly, to allow the ink to dry,
since the surface does not absorb ink.  This means that 1440 dpi
highest quality is required.  720 dpi softweave lays down too much ink
too quickly, with the result that everything blobs up.  However,
there's little sense in using this expensive media (I'm using
relatively cheap third party glossy film that I picked up at a show)
with anything less than maximum quality.

On the other hand, this paper requires very precise density
calibration, since the ink doesn't spread out (unless too much is laid
down too quickly).  For that reason, it also requires a more gentle
transition between CMY and K than ordinary paper does, since the black
won't spread out to fill the inter-dot gaps.  I suspect that a density
of .95 works well (since .9 was too low and 1.0 appears a bit too high).

Finally, the color balance is very neutral.

I've checked in preliminary support for glossy film to the Epson driver.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rl...@al...>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lp...@uu...
Project lead for The Gimp Print --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
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