[ILUG] Good photo printing

[Dave Neary]

"John P. Looney" wrote:
> 
>  I've tryed (with the gimp) to print out photos. But they look crap. I've
> also tryed with gimp in windows, using the standard microsoft printing
> mechanism. I select "glossy photo paper" the whole works. But I can't get
> anything to do something like "print to an a6 size page, really high
> quality". To test it, I was using reasonably high quality jpeg's from
> photo.net.
> 
>  If someone could give advice on how to print - and possibly as
> importantly - where to get good example hi-res photo images, I'd be dead
> chuffed.

To be honest most printers aren't up to it. If yours is you're lucky :)
If you have a 6-color printer, then photos should look OK (with settings
for gimp-print something like Adaptive Hybrid dithering, 1440x720 dpi,
set colour adjustments to taste). I know people who swear by photoshop
for this type of stuff (sick, huh?).

The problem with the GIMP is that (a) it doesn't support CMYK
colourspace for images, so what you see isn't necessarily what you get,
and (b) GIMP-Print basically converts your image to postscript and uses
the ghostscript driver for the printer, which isn't great for photo
quality. Once the GIMP supports CMYK (coming in 1.3, I think -
definitely there by 2.0) things will probably be better for printing -
as it is that's pretty much what GIMP-Print does at the moment (convert
to cmyk, then PS, then print).

The good example hi-res images: I could send you a couple that should be
OK if you wanted.

>  Also, how hard is it to make a photo album type thing that could be
> played on a consumer DVD player ? I think most DVD player's play video
> CDs...

No ideas at all for this, I'm afraid. Except I know that my DVD player
(thanks, Conor) does play video CDs, if that's any help...

> John

Cheers,
Dave.
-- 
David Neary,               E-Mail dave.neary at palamon.ie
Palamon Technologies Ltd.  Phone +353-1-634-5059