ColorByte's ImagePrint 6

High-performance raster image processor

The Achilles’ heel of most printers is the quality of the drivers and the packaged canned paper profiles. An inferior paper profile results in color discrepancies between your monitor and print. In addition, prints can suffer from metamerism, bronzing, loss of subtle detail, and often, in the case of grayscale printing, tones that aren’t neutral. ColorByte’s ImagePrint 6 raster image processor is the solution. It takes over driving your printer, delivering beautifully detailed color and neutral-grayscale prints.

Version 6 is a major upgrade with many significant new features, including undo, adding annotations to images, an image browser, nudging images using the arrow keys, and preset layout templates or the ability to customize your own.

At the core of ImagePrint is an extensive library of exquisite, high-quality color and grayscale paper profiles. Each color profile is optimized for the light the print will be viewed in, eliminating the effects of metamerism. Colorbyte is constantly adding new profiles that can be downloaded free from their website.

Although ImagePrint features color-management tools, its strength is as a print driver, not an image editor. ImagePrint’s engine reveals much more rich detail in the shadow and highlight areas than standard drivers with their canned profiles. The result: superb matched prints with rich, saturated colors and gradients that transition smoothly, with no signs of banding—and the best neutral-tone grayscale images I’ve seen.

One annoyance is that the workflow still consists of two separate interfaces—the layout screen and the spoolface. Printing directly from Photoshop bypasses ImagePrint’s interface and goes directly to the spooler.

The price is based on your printer model; e.g., ImagePrint for Epson’s 9600 costs $2,495, the Epson 7600 costs $1,495, and the new Epson 4000 is $895. Colorbyte offers a less expensive “lite” version but certain features are grayed out.

PRICE: Depends on printer model
FOR: X
FROM: ColorByte Software
PHONE: 813-963-0241
WEB: www.colorbytesoftware.com
RATING: 4.5