Another major Qimage update
By
Mike Tomkins
(Tuesday, November 30, 2004 - 18:09 EST)
Mike Chaney, author of popular Windows imaging utility Qimage, just emailed us to let us know he's released a new version with some fairly significant updates.
If you're not already familiar with Qimage, we'd have to rate it as one of the most consistently useful (and frequently improved) shareware imaging programs we've come across. We use it regularly ourselves, and its features span the gamut from printing (the original forte and reason behind the program's existence) to image editing, filtering, batch-processing, management, comparison, slide-shows and a whole lot more besides.
Updates in Qimage v2005.100 include: - Improved performance: A major redesign of the internal image processing algorithms has put a brand new powerplant under the hood! v2005.100 is both faster and less memory intensive than prior versions. You'll see a performance increase of about 30% or better on many operations such as printing and will see some operations finish up to 5 times faster than before, all while using less memory (RAM and hard drive scratch space) than ever before!
- Improved stability: The reduced memory footprint of v2005.100 leads to greater overall stability when performing time and memory intensive operations and will assist in getting the job through on those older, slower, and less capable machines.
- Ability to handle larger images: The pixel/resolution limit has been increased from 32,768 x 32,768 to 100,000 x 100,000 pixels, allowing you to open, view, and print much larger images such as collages and panoramas (subject to the memory limitations of your machine of course).
- Printing multiple copies: Improved performance when printing multiple copies of the same image (in the same orientation).
- Page background color: Ability to select a background color for your printed page so that all pages print with the specified background color.
- "In queue" indicator for thumbnails: The file names listed under thumbnails in the thumbnail grid will now be bold if at least one copy of that thumbnail is already in the queue. This gives a quick indication of which thumbnails have already been added to the queue.
- Load printer setup: The "load printer setup" function now restores the default print size used the last time the printer setup was saved.
- Borderless printing: Ability to control (turn on/off) the print size expansion and overspray characteristics of your print driver's borderless mode even if your print driver doesn't have an "amount of extension" control. If you use the borderless option in your print driver but don't like how it always stretches prints to a larger size and oversprays the edges of the paper, simply click "Page", "Borderless overspray/expansion" and select "disable".
- Prints with borders: The print border is no longer sharpened along with the print when printing images with a border.
- Startup: Qimage will now start in the "My Pictures" folder by default, unless the folder does not exist.
- Thumbnail font: Changed the default thumbnail font to Arial 7 for better readability.
- Email/web copies: The email/web copies dialog now closes automatically when Qimage is finished making web/email copies of images.
- Memory issue: Fixed a memory "leak" that occurred on some machines when building the first page of thumbnails for the first time.
- Profile embedding and IPTC: Fixed a bug that was causing images with IPTC data to omit the embedded profile, causing the saved image to have no embedded profile.
- Minor interface issues: Fixed some minor interface bugs such as missing hot keys, default print size not rotating under certain conditions, white balance dropper in the batch filter not working with the filter preview window open, etc.
A demo of Qimage can be downloaded for a 30-day trial, and the full program can be purchased for $44.95.
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