[Cake]

Greetings!

My sister has started her own business and is well on her way, but she's experiencing problems when she tries to print from PhotoShop.

She has a 11x17 file with text and tiff images that she has created in PhotoShop weighing in at about 5.2MB.
She has a HP CP1700 and is using a Tangerine iBook (OS 9.2.2, 384MB of RAM).
The problem is that it takes forever to print. Spooling, imaging and finally printing takes a half an hour.

As an experiment, she duplicated the layout of this file in Quark and it came out to be about 615K and printed fine, but the colors were off (ColorSync issue?).
She also tried reducing the resolution of her tiffs from 300dpi to 200dpi, but she didn't like the quality even though it did print a bit faster (15min as opposed to 30min.)

She has a show coming up in three days and doesn't have time to change everything over to Quark.

What's going on here? Is this a printer memory issue?
Maybe a PhotoShop thing (why are the file sizes so different between PS and Quark with the same content)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

- BTW, she knows that the little iBook that I gave her is woefully underpowered for her needs and will be upgrading whenever her finances allow.

[teszeract]

... and I print my pdf's. eps from Photoshop when I need speed! Go figure.

try printing the image after flattening ... worth a try.

[meem]

FYI...The quark file is much smaller because the picture is not embedded in the file. Think of quark sort of like html. where it just says "Put this picture here." You probably notice that the image is not at full resolution in quark viewed on screen. Thats so that designers working on layout don't have many huge pics open at the same time which would slow computer down even more.

I know this doesn't help your situation (i'm still trying to wrap my head around colorsync) especially with your time constraints but like i said ...FYI

[Cake]

teszeract, I believe that she's flattening before printing, but I'll check just in case. Thanks.

meem, Thanks for the info.
That's good to know and I'll pass the knowledge on to her.

[jtice]

Originally posted by Cake:
Greetings!

My sister has started her own business and is well on her way, but she's experiencing problems when she tries to print from PhotoShop.

She has a 11x17 file with text and tiff images that she has created in PhotoShop weighing in at about 5.2MB.
She has a HP CP1700 and is using a Tangerine iBook (OS 9.2.2, 384MB of RAM).
The problem is that it takes forever to print. Spooling, imaging and finally printing takes a half an hour.

As an experiment, she duplicated the layout of this file in Quark and it came out to be about 615K and printed fine, but the colors were off (ColorSync issue?).
She also tried reducing the resolution of her tiffs from 300dpi to 200dpi, but she didn't like the quality even though it did print a bit faster (15min as opposed to 30min.)

She has a show coming up in three days and doesn't have time to change everything over to Quark.

What's going on here? Is this a printer memory issue?
Maybe a PhotoShop thing (why are the file sizes so different between PS and Quark with the same content)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

- BTW, she knows that the little iBook that I gave her is woefully underpowered for her needs and will be upgrading whenever her finances allow.

----------
For starters, if we're talking about 11x17 *inches at 300 dpi the file size ain't gonna be anywhere near 5mb. Try 48.2mb. In Photoshop every single pixel adds to the file size–even white space. I'm not familiar with that printer, but if it's a consumer type ink jet that half hour probably isn't out of line for that size file. When she builds the same page in Quark only the actual pixel dimensions of the tiffs count toward file size and the rest of the page is virtually free. Use Photoshop for photos, Quark for pages with text. Illustrator makes nice pages for ads and so forth if you don't need the document features in Quark.

If the color came out right in PS and wrong in Quark it's almost surely a wrong setting or wrong profile. Or she could be sending CMYK data when the printer needs RGB. She has to get all the color settings correct. Check the color mode (RGB/CMYK) and make sure it matches what the printer expects–probaby RGB. Make sure the document and all the images are tagged with the working space profile (Adobe RGB 1998) and that the souce in the print dialog is set for the same profile. Then check to make sure the destination is set for the printer's profile. Check the documentation to see whether Quark will use the printer driver to interpret color or if the driver's color correction needs to be turned off. In PS you turn the driver correction off–not sure about Quark. Get this stuff right and you'll at least be close.

JT