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Canon’s Free Layout Tool allows you to nest images together and reduce media waste. This month, how to use this feature Macintosh style.

By Tom Hauenstein

“So many social engagements, so little time…”

-Gale Snopes, Raising Arizona

Printing through the Canon printer is considered by most to be quite easy, especially through the Print Plug-In, and if you need a refresher, click here.  However, the biggest drawback to printing through the Canon driver or Print Plug-In is that you can only print one image at a time unless you build a composite image in Photoshop.

Building composite images is time-consuming and creates large files that you end up deleting after you print. But using the Free Layout Tool through the Canon driver allows you to print multiple images at the same time, improving efficiency and reducing media waste.

Since using the tool with a PC or a Mac is fairly different, I’ve taken the liberty of dividing this discussion up into two parts. Last month, I detailed how to download and use the tool with a PC. This time, I’ve laid out the instructions for Mac users…

Notes of Note

Like all things out there, the Free Layout Tool is limited in some ways. First, the source space, or embedded profile, of all the images you plan to nest must be the same. For example you can’t lay out images tagged with sRGB next to images tagged with Adobe RGB 1998. If you want to do that, convert the images in the smaller color space (sRGB) to the larger color space (Adobe RGB 1998) before using this tool.

Another thing to consider is that the more files you add to this tool the larger the file being created. I was using this tool at WPPI to print multiple copies of a file that was creating by scanning 8x10 film. Needless to say, the file was large… around 400MB. In the layout I created five copies of the image. Very soon my computer was processing a 2-GB file.

The moral of the story here is that if you are going to create large layouts with large files, make sure you have the RAM to support it or your processing time will cancel out the efficiency improvements this tool offers.

Finally, the only way you can use the Free Layout Tool is by printing through the Canon driver, not the Plug-In, which means you can only process images at 8 bit. So if your client demands the very best in image quality (the 16-bit processing you enjoy through the Plug-In), then I would not recommend using this tool.

The Lowdown on the Download

First, In order to use the Free Layout Tool on a Mac, you must download it. It can be found at www.canon-europe.com. Select Support at the top of this page. On the next page select Driver Download, which is found on the left-hand side of the page.

In the Large Format Printers dialog box, select your printer model. This will open a new window with a ton of different software and firmware options for your printer.

Scroll to the bottom and find the Printer Driver Extra Kit for MAC OSX. There is one for Leopard and one for the other OSX operating systems, so make sure you download the correct version (see Figure 1). Run the install on it and you will be ready to use it the next time you print.

Finding Your Way

In order to get started on the Mac with the Free Layout Tool, you need to have at least one of the files that you want to print open in Photoshop. Then go to File -> Print if you are running CS3 or CS4 (see Figure 2). Go to File -> Print with Preview in earlier versions of Photoshop. There are three things that must be done in this dialog box…

First, you must go into Page Setup and select a page size that is slightly larger than your image size. I usually create a page size that is about a quarter of an inch larger in both directions. In this example, I’m printing a 17x11 so I will create a page size that is 17.25 x 11.25.

When you open Page Setup, go to Manage Custom Sizes and create this new page size (see Figure 3).

Then, go back to the original page size dialog box and select this newly created Paper Size formatted for the printer (see Figure 4). Now you will see that your image fits within the newly created page size.

Next, turn off color management in Photoshop. I usually recommend that you use Photoshop for color management, but we are going to set up color management in the Free Layout Tool instead, which we will discuss below (see Figure 5).

Then hit Print. This will open the printer dialog box. Click on the PDF dialog box on the lower left of the screen and select Canon imagePROGRAF Free Layout. This will open up the Free Layout Tool and bring your image into it (see Figure 6).

Using the Free Layout Tool

Once you are in the Free Layout tool, you can add other images by doing the same thing we did for the first image (Photoshop will remember to keep Color Management to No Color Management), and then select the tool in the printer driver. The only thing you need to remember to do is to create that custom page size for the image you want to add to the printer (see Figure 7).

On the right you will see a Page Setup dropdown. In the Media Type section select the correct media type and quality modes that were used to create the profile. LexJet provides all of that information with its profiles at the LexJet website. Below that you need to select the Media Source, Roll Paper Width, and the Automatic Cutting options. 

You should then change the dropdown at the top to Set Color (see Figure 8). Switch the Mode to ICC Correction and the Matching Method to either Perceptual or Colorimetric (No Wht-pnt Corr). Your Input Profile should be the input profiles of the images you brought in, which in our case here is Adobe RGB (1998).

For Printer Profile Settings at the bottom of this box, select the ICC profile for your paper and image (see Figure 9).

Once you are in the Free Layout tool, you can make multiple copies of the same image by control-clicking on it and hitting copy. Then in white space you can hit paste. Feel free to use the Apple C and Apple V keyboard shortcuts for this.

You can also resize the image on the fly by dragging on the corner of the image. Finally, you can rotate images by right-clicking on an image and telling it to Rotate Left or Rotate Right 90 Degrees. You can fill up a roll width rather easily with this tool as you can see in Figure 10.

The initial setup is a little different than what you may be used to, but it can prove to be a real time saver after you get through the learning curve. Give it a shot to see if it helps you.