What's New in Photo-Paint 10 - Part 6: Colour and Printing

PART 6. Colour and Printing

1. Colour Management.
A completely redesigned UI makes colour management more intuitive by combining all the essential colour management options in one redesigned dialogue box. You can now take advantage of the predefined colour management styles or save your own colour management profiles.

This new Colour Management Tool is simply WONDERFUL! and would make many a Mac/Adobe fan quite jealous. - It is a pure joy to use compared to traditional colour management tools. Expect to see copy-cats of this in other products in the future.

To turn colour management off or on to or from a particular device, simply click on a grey or orange arrow. Grey means that that profile is DISABLED, while orange shows that it is ENABLED.

The small down arrows lead to substantial drop-down lists which contain selections for many predefined profiles, or those you have created and saved yourself.

Click on any of the device icons themselves opens up Advanced Colour management features dialogue boxes for that device. For instance, clicking on the Import/Export device (the set of 3 pages on the upper left), allows you to set whether to use embedded ICC document profiles when importing, if no ICC profile then which other, whether to embed internal RGB or ICC profiles while exporting etc. Whether to embed an internal RGB profile in your images is important, especially for JPEGs used on the web, which do not normally contain embedded profiles. If you find that the JPEGs you create in PP10 seem unreasonably large, then look here and turn off embedding during export (or click the outward bound orange arrow to the import/export manager) to reduce their files sizes back to normal. An embedded internal RGB profile can add about 170KB to a JPEG file!

Colour Management really is an art and a full explanation is far beyond the scope of this simple review. There are many great web sites and books where you can learn more about it. A graphics system that has been colour tuned with your own specific device profiles will ensure that WYSIWYG lives up to its name both on screen and on paper.

2. Publish to PDF Enhancements.
You can now embed an ICC colour profile, author and keyword information, and any type of file into a PDF file. You can also publish several open documents to one multi-page PDF file.

The dialogue boxes shown below appear when you press the 'Settings' button on the 'Save as PDF' dialogue box (where you choose a file name and folder to save in) after choosing File > Publish to PDF.


The General Tab on the Publish to PDF dialogue box. Here you can set the output PDF version, select single or multiple open documents, choose a preset PDF style or create your own.	The Advanced Tab on the Publish To PDF dialogue box. Here you can define the output of objects, include ICC profiles and include additional files to embed in your PDF document.

The Preflight Tab and preflight Settings in the Publish To PDF Export dialogue. The Preflight Settings dialogue also lets to set options for printed output, SVG Export and SWF (Flash) output. You can create your own personal preflight checking options presets and save them for later use and for specific tasks.

3. Colour Sliders.
New colour sliders have been added to the Colour Docker window (Window > Dockers > Color or CTRL-F2) that work with all the standard colour models as well as with Web-safe colours.

You can view colours using colour sliders, colour viewers, or by specific colour palettes using the 3 small icons on the right of the dialogue.

Separate colours can be set for Paint, Paper and Fill swatches by selecting the swatch from the 3 'pages' at the upper left. The method (slider, viewer or palette) used to choose the colour for each swatch can be different in each case! PP10 remembers your choices. The small Options panel which opens when you click the tiny arrow (upper right) is also context sensitive and changes according to your chosen viewer or palette.

When using Colour Palettes, any palette can be chosen from the full list available in the drop down list just above the named colours list.

For such a small and rather simple looking docker there is everything you need here to select, create, manage and adjust your image colours and your preset and custom palettes.

4. Print Separations.
You can now specify the order of colour separations and can align all printers' marks to the edge of a graphic or to the edge of a page.

5. In-RIP Trapping.
You can streamline your workflow by specifying trapping and separations parameters in advance with a full range of In-RIP trapping options for PostScript 3 output devices.

(You must be printing to a Postscript level 3 compatible device before these options become available).


What's New in Photo-Paint 10 - PART 6