PUBLICATION CENTER

By Tom Hauenstein

“I’d rather light a candle than curse your darkness.”

– Gale Snopes, Raising Arizona

Printing through the Canon printer is considered by most to be quite easy, especially through the Print Plug-In. If you need a refresher on how to do so, then 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. Using the Free Layout Tool through the Canon driver allows you to print multiple images at the same time, which will improve efficiency and reduce media waste. The method is quite different between a Mac and a PC, so we will cover each one in detail in separate articles. Next month, we’ll tackle using the tool with the Mac.

Keep this in Mind

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 layout images tagged with sRGB next to images tagged with Adobe RGB 1998. If you want to do that, then I would 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 you are creating. For example, I was using this tool at WPPI recently to print multiple copies of a file created by scanning 8x10 film. Needless to say, the file was large… around 400MB. Ouch!

In the layout I created five copies of this image, and soon my computer was processing a 2GB file. Double ouch! 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. You can only process images at 8 bit rather than 16 bit through the driver, so if your client demands the very best in image quality, then I would not recommend using this tool.

PC – Getting to the Free Layout Tool

In order to get started on the PC, 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 1). You will 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 am printing a 10x16, so I will select a page size that is 10.25 x 16.25.

When you open Page Setup you should go to the second tab in the Canon Driver called Page Setup (see Figure 2).

Then I will select size options at the bottom of this page and create that custom page size, so select Add then hit Okay (see Figure 3).

Then go to the Page Size option in the Page Setup tab and select the newly created page size (see Figure 4).

Next, you need to go the Layout tab. In here you need to click on the Page Layout box and select Free Layout, which is at the bottom, and hit Okay (see Figure 5).

Finally, you need to turn off color management in Photoshop. I usually recommend that you use Photoshop for your color handling, but we are going to set up color management in the Free Layout Tool, which we will discuss below (see Figure 6).

Then hit Print. This will open the image in the Free Layout Tool (see Figure 7).

PC – 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 the Canon driver will remember to keep the Free Layout tool checked. 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 8).

The first thing you want to do in this tool is go to File -> Detailed Settings (see Figure 9). Here is where you need to select the correct media type and quality modes that were used to create the profile. LexJet provides all of that information with its profiles, which can be found at the LexJet website.

You should then go into the Color Settings box found on this page and set up color management (see Figure 10).

Go right to the second tab labeled Matching. Select ICC Correction Mode in the Matching Mode Section. Check the Use the Same Profile for All Objects check box below this. Select your preferred Matching Method, either Perceptual or Colorimetric (No Wht-pnt Corr). The Input Profile should be the input profiles of the images you brought in, which is Adobe RGB (1998) in our case. For Printer Profile Settings at the bottom of this box, select the ICC profile for your paper and image.

Then go to the Page Setup Tab and select the roll width currently loaded in your printer. In our case it is a 44-in. roll (see Figure 11). Then hit Okay.

Once in the Free Layout tool, you can make multiple copies of the same image by right-clicking on it and choosing Copy. Then in the white space you can hit Paste. Feel free to use the Control C and Control 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 Right 90 Degrees. You can fill up a roll width rather easily with this tool as you can see in Figure 12.

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