General Notes:

Qimage now supports ICC profiles for input devices (cameras and scanners) as well as your printer and monitor. Color profiles are used to ensure accurate and consistent color for output devices. You can access Qimage Pro color management by selecting "Options" from the top menubar on the main screen and then "Color Management (ICC)".

First, define the color profiles for your output devices (monitor and printer). Click "Settings", "Color Management" from the top menu bar and then:

• To set up a monitor profile: Check the "Enabled" box next to "Monitor" and then click the "Browse" button to browse ICM profiles for your monitor. If you do not have a specific ICM profile for your monitor (most systems have some generic monitor profiles located in the C:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/spool/drivers/colo folder), you can select the generic sRGB profile from your Qimage folder. sRGB should provide a reasonable middle ground for most monitors. It is best to use a program like WiziWYG or Monaco EZ Color to profile your monitor specifically rather than using generic "Trinitron" labelled profiles since monitor primaries can vary quite a bit between monitor manufacturers. WiziWYG software provides the monitor profiling part of their software for free since both of these packages are really designed to profile scanners and printers.

• To set up a printer profile: Simply check the "Enabled" box in the "Printer (output)" group and then click the browse button and select the ICM profile for your printer. This could be the profile you created when you used software to calibrate your printer, or one that you downloaded off the web from the manufacturer, etc. Please note that most printer profiles only apply to one media type, therefore it is extremely important that: (1) you have the right profile selected for your current media type and (2) your printer properties (under "Queue Actions", "Printer Setup") are set to the exact parameters required for the profile. For example, most printer profiles are designed for the printer properties set up for "no color management" since you are performing color management here separately. If so, you'll need to make sure that your driver settings are set appropriately. Please refer to either the software users guide if you created the profile yourself, or the instruction from the web site where you obtained the profile. When in doubt, set the print driver to the most "plain vanilla" settings as possible, i.e. the highest quality settings but NO color management. Remember that when you set up the Qimage color management for your printer, you do not want to have the "ICM" box checked in your print driver. If you do, you'll be "doubling up" on the profile (Qimage will profile it once and then your print driver will profile it again). If you cannot locate a profile for your printer, it is possible that your printer is set up by default to assume sRGB color space, so you could try selecting sRGB.icm from the c:\program files\qimage folder as a last resort.

Next, define the color space used by your input devices (digicam, scanner, etc):

• About the image (input) profiles: You can associate multiple devices with ICM profiles using the grid under "Input profiles". The first line in the grid is always a "fall back" selection to be used when a specific device profile cannot be matched. You can add as many lines after this first entry as you like, specifying either the device model name (based on EXIF model number) or the resolution of the images. Using the grid to "tag" your devices with specific ICM profiles allows you to define the color spaces used by different devices. Most cameras and scanners, although their images may look acceptable without profiling, do not normally deliver images that truly conform to any known color space. If you have ICM profiles that define the color space used by your output devices like your printer and monitor, you need an input profile that describes the color space of your camera or scanner to be able to accurately display or print images. For example, if you have an ICM profile that describes the color space used by the Nikon CP990 camera, you could add a new line in the table, enter (or browse to) the profile name to that row in the table by clicking the "Select ICM Profile" button. Next, while still on the same row in the table, click the "Extract EXIF Model Name" button and select an ORIGINAL image (JPG or TIFF) from the CP990 camera. The model name "E990" will be entered in the table. It's that simple. Qimage will now use the specified ICM profile any time an ORIGINAL CP990 image is displayed or printed (provided you enabled the monitor and printer profiles - see above). We all know that EXIF information is not always preserved after modifying originals, so you can also specify the resolution as a last resort. For example, if you leave the EXIF model name blank and enter 2048 and 1536 in the X res and Y res columns respectively, Qimage will use the specified profile on all 2048 x 1536 images.

• About embedded profiles: Qimage does not currently support embedded profiles in images. Some images that have been modified in PhotoShop (full version) may have been saved with the ICC profile embedded in the image itself. Since we have not found anything other than PhotoShop and PhotoPaint that even acknowledge ICC profiles, it's not likely that you'll run across images with embedded profiles. In addition, we have not found any digicams that embed profiles in their images, mostly due to the fact that many of the cameras do not truly conform to any working space. That said, sRGB will probably give you the closest color for most cameras if you do not have a specific profile. If you do open images that have embedded profile, note that Qimage will ignore the embedded profile and will use whatever you selected in the "Images (input)" parameter. As long as you select the appropriate profile in the input parameter above, Qimage will do the correct conversion.

• How about Nikon D1 raw (NEF) images?: Beginning with version 12.02, Qimage automatically recognizes and assigns an appropriate input profile whenever an image with .NEF extension is viewed or printed. This means that you do not need an entry in the "Input Profiles" table for NEF images: they will automatically be assigned "d1-nef.icm" from your Qimage program folder. If you check in the folder where you have Qimage installed (normally \program files\qimage), you will see all the common working spaces like sRGB, Apple, Adobe, etc. and the d1-nef.icm profile will also be installed in the same folder and must be present in that location for Qimage to be able to properly profile NEF images. Note that if the d1-nef.icm profile is not present in the folder with the "qimage.exe" program, NEF images will not be profiled and will look very dark with inaccurate color. In addition, if your monitor and printer profiles have not been selected and activated (see above), Qimage may know what to profile from (d1-nef.icm) but will not know what color space to profile to, and the raw (dark/inaccurate) data will be displayed. See the D1 NEF Tips page online for more info on profiling D1 NEF images.

About working spaces:

• Working spaces available in your Qimage folder: Most of the popular working spaces (such as Adobe, sRGB, etc) are located in the Qimage folder - usually c:\program files\qimage). If you edit images often in PhotoShop and save them in another space such as Adobe, you might want to change your "fall back" input profile (first line in the grid under color management) to Adobe.icm. Doing this will allow you to edit images in another ICC aware application and still use the appropriate profile when printing the images that have been saved in another color space.

Profile to profile conversions:

• Converting from one color space to another: You can now convert images from one color space to another color space whenever you use the batch filter or the image converter (right click in the queue, select "convert images"). Note that the profile conversion appears on the filter application window that appears after using the batch filter, i.e. it is not a part of the batch filter. You can only do profile to profile conversions from the batch filter when you select "Create New Images" after selecting "apply filter". For example, if you purchased the Nikon D1 JPEG color space profile (see the link on the Qimage homepage), in addition to being able to print and display super accurate images using Qimage , you can also convert those D1 images into a color space more suitable for web display. To do this, just add some D1 JPEG's to the queue and then right click in the queue and select "convert images". At the bottom of the dialog, check the "profile to profile conversion" box and enter the nikond1.icm profile in the "From" box and "sRGB.icm" (found in your Qimage folder) in the "To" box. All images will be converted into the specified "To" profile and you will have the originals (in the nikond1.icm color space) and the converted images (in sRGB.icm color space).

• Converting multiple files from multiple cameras: If you enter <input> in the "From" box, Qimage will select the appropriate device input profile using the information in the grid under "Options", "Color Management". Using this parameter will allow you to convert a batch of D1 and S1 image from their respective color spaces into sRGB for example.

Appearance of thumbnail and draft images used in printout previews, etc.

• Thumbnails and draft images: The images that you see in the thumbnail grid and on the small preview page will appear different depending on your settings at the time the thumbnails were created. When you enter a new folder or select "Refresh Thumbs", the thumbnails are saved using the current settings under "Settings", "Color Management", "Monitor". In other words, if you have monitor color management turned OFF and you select "Refresh Thumbs", your thumbnails will continue to appear as they do with color management OFF until you refresh them again with monitor color management ON. Similarly, thumbnails will appear as they do with color management ON if they were created that way and have not been refreshed. Qimage uses this method to speed up thumbnail display since profiling numerous thumbnails "on the fly" would slow down program operation.

Instructions for using profiling tools with Qimage Pro:

The following tips apply to generating your own printer profiles for use with Qimage. If you are using third party profile generators such as WiziWYG, Monaco EZ Color, etc. the following will help ensure that you get the most accurate color possible when printing with Qimage.

1. Disconnect any and all instances of color management that Windows handles for you. We recommend looking under "Start", "Settings", "Printers" and on your printers "Properties", "Color Management" tab, make sure there are NO ICC profiles in there.
2. In your profiling generation software, use the "Save TIFF" option to save the target as a TIF file.
3. Exit the profiling software and go into Qimage and print the test target that was saved in (2) and print it using Qimage on a portrait page, filling the page. Make sure you use the exact same Qimage AND print driver settings that you will be using *after* you create the profile: print driver color correction turned off, "Max" print quality in QP, etc.
4. Now go back into your profiling software and create your profile using the test target printed by Qimage.
5. Now that you have a profile and want to use it in Qimage , when you print through Qimage , simply ensure that all Windows color management is still off and use the profile that your profiling software saved earlier under "Printer" in Qimage's own "Settings", "Color Management" section. Of course, just as important is to ensure that Qimage's input color profile "manager" is pointing all your cameras to the right *input* profile. Fortunately, that's simple to do: just look at the entry in the queue and the input profile that is connected to all of your images is displayed on the right.

Even if you don't use Qimage and use another package to print, I would always recommend using the package that you will be using *after* the profiling to actually *do* the profiling. I would *never* recommend simply "dumping" the profile to the printer like most profiling packages allow you to. You should be using the same printing tools on both ends otherwise more variables creep into the equation.

This, and disabling the profiles at a Windows level eliminates more variables than most people realize. In addition, it takes the burden of the actual profiling off the Windows system and/or the print driver and places this very important operation in programs that are designed to give you high quality profile conversions: like Qimage. By leaving the profiling to your print driver, although it normally works fine, you are entrusting your print driver with doing the conversion which may be highly dependent on the printer/driver.

Click here to go to the Qimage Color Management Homepage for more information on color management.