QuadTone RIP
http://www.quadtonerip.com/html/QTRoverview.html
When you’re on a budget and are still looking to produce professional quality prints on, say, your Epson, you can either spend hours soft-proofing and tryingg to get the printer profiles to work for you. Or you can cave in and get an RIP. That doesn’t stand for “rest in peace”, but for “raster image processor”. Next to spending a ton of money to have your printer custom-calibrated, this is the way to go if you want your prints to look like what you have on your screen.
Luckily, at least for black and white prints, there’s QuadTone RIP, which can be downloaded for free. If it meets your needs, please consider donating/paying a shareware fee to Roy Harrington, the author. This will ensure that great software like this is around for a few years.
For those who have not worked with an RIP: the short layman’s definition is “a program which forces a printer to render images more closely compared to what one sees on the screen”. In other words, the software overrides printer settings if done right, and thereby gives you more control over how the image is rendered when printed out. If you have ever tried it without such a piece of software, you have likely torn out as much hair as I have before I mended my ways.
Without an RIP like QuadTone, prints on my Epson 2400 tended to be WAY too dark, no matter what medium they were printed on, no matter what I did to them (softproofing, fiddling with printer settings – you name it). My calibrated monitor showed them just right, but they came out all messed up. And sometimes I don’t want to send pictures out to a professional lab, but instead print them on other media, like water color paper.
QuadTone produces really nice black and white prints. Convert your photograph to a .tif file, set paper size, medium etc., and you are on your way to lots and lots of beautiful black and white prints on virtually any medium your printer will support, from roll paper to cold press water color paper. Print in different hues of black, split-toned or sepia. As far as black and white goes, the results will win you over immediately.
