464 CHAPTER (Web hosting uk) 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS Here is
464 CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS Here is where you adjust the brightness, contrast, and color balance of your prints. Every printer model is a little different. Some may emphasize one color or another; others may print too light or too dark, or have other problems. This isn t very important when you re printing out web maps and directions, or even fliers for your company picnic. But when you re making glossy photos to hang on your wall or give to relatives, it matters. To find out how your printer stacks up, you will probably have to experiment, printing several images and trying different settings. This can be slightly costly since you can use up ink and expensive paper. Fortunately, you don t need to print full-page images to test a printer: you can print small images, feed the same page through multiple times, and use the Gimp-Print position and size settings to place the image at a different location on the page each time. On a particularly tricky image, you might want to create a smaller test image that includes some of the extremes of the original. The Gutenprint plug-in allows still more adjustments. It gives you a list of presets, such as Mixed Text and Graphics (the default) or Line Art, but selecting Manual Control gives you a long list of every value you might possibly want to adjust. Most of them are grayed-out by default; try clicking the toggle button next to any item to enable it. Once you ve found settings that look the way you want them (which usually means that the printed image looks similar to the image you see on screen), you can Save Settings, and Gimp-Print will remember these settings next time. Each setting has a tooltip: to see it, hover over the text field for that setting. Some of the tricky ones are Density, Gamma, and Dither Algorithm. Density controls the amount of ink used for printing. Normally, this should not need adjustment, but if your prints come out with so much ink that it smears or soaks into the paper, or so little that black areas aren t fully black or colors seem faded, this is the place to adjust it. You met Gamma briefly in Chapter 2: it corresponds to the middle slider in the Levels dialog. Generally, gamma works like brightness: larger values mean a brighter print; smaller values mean a darker one. However, adjusting gamma won t change the levels of black or white in the image, only the middle tones in between. Dither Algorithm controls how the GIMP maps its internal RGB colors to the CMYK colors the printer understands. In addition, printing almost always involves some scaling: it s not likely that the number of pixels in your image will exactly match the number of dots your printer would use at the size you want the image to appear. Fortunately, the print software does a good job of scaling and color mapping. Most of the time, the default methods it uses are fine, but if you ever want to fine-tune the result, you can choose from a variety of algorithms: Adaptive Hybrid (the default), Ordered, Fast, Very Fast, Hybrid Floyd-Steinberg, or EvenTone. The Gimp-Print project recommends using Adaptive Hybrid for highest quality. That should be the default, and most of the time you can leave it alone. If you want to experiment with other settings, Ordered can work just as well and is faster for images with mostly continuous tones (no text or line art). Fast is faster, but at the expense of quality (Very Fast is more so, but it sacrifices more quality than most people will tolerate). You can get details on some of the other algorithms on the Gimp-Print website, gimp-print.sourceforge.net. Print to File Even if you don t have a printer connected to your GIMP machine, you can print to a PostScript file. In the Printer name menu at the top of Printer Settings, choose *File. You will be prompted for a file name. It s probably best to give the file a name with a .ps extension, so that every machine where you try to use it will recognize that it s PostScript.
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