You are right as always Don, I was trying to alter the size at the top, but looking more carefully it has dropped to the bottom...serves me right for dabbling in b&w when I can hardly do colour

and yes, I am not going to let a camera like this gather dust and how can one practice NX without a range of picture types?

Its the selection process I am getting a bit frustrated with now; like many terms and icons that look familiar, they don't mean the same thing, 'faux amis' our French teacher used to call them...and vast as the help file is when you explore it further, it is still in Japanglais

It was too good to be true - I have come to the downside on my 1st attempt at printing. Ignoring for now the ghastly imperial lack of exact control 'page layout', the colour is worse than anything I have experienced for years. Printing was the jewel in the crown of DPP, straight off the .CR2 masterfile, sized and placed to a fraction of a mm and poke.

camera & all software set to Adobe or Nikon RGB, Epson 1290 set to gloss film (as on instructions for Ilford Gallerie paper), epson management set to 'no colour adjustment'; tried realtive and absolute colorimeteric and perceptual with virtually no difference. All overgreen and muddy, just like the garden.

So do I have to save a max quality .jpg to cart off to DPP, or does anyone have any other suggestions?

Chris,

I have limited experience of printing and cannot really help but I believe you need the correct colour profile for your printer.

I use NX only for primary editting and always save as TIFF before resizing and sharpening in Photoshop. Colour profile is converted just before I save to JPEG.

You are right in that the preferences I had put in including the printer & paper had gone awol, probably I had set them in the session before I crashed it. Unfortunately restoring them doesn't improve the print quality. Nikon must have the printer data wrong, both printable area and colour profile, so it is 'save as' and print from DPP which has it right as well as more layout options.

Since (a) mastering the colour management using DPP (b) joining a local camera club, I do a lot of printing now....in fact more robins and saints waiting for implanting on Christmas cards this very minute

Have you investigated 'Soft Proof' located at the bottom of the image. It allows different settings to be proofed before printing.

Yes, when you have the correct setting for the printer & paper in 'Preferences', this works well in proof and actual print.

A missing link is in place: one can sort ones pics so they look good on both web and prints.

I have got round the print sizing problem by creating some custom paper sizes a few mm larger than A4 etc and with top, left and right margins set at 0.1. This produces prints as near to the edge of the paper as the system ever allows, about 3mm. My Epson 1290 is now quite old and Epson never did a proper driver for OS10 using its 'borderless' printing facility. Anyway that is as good as DPP. Small sample tests can be done using the 2up etc; inelegant but works.

Incidentally you said it was possible to 'stamp' or 'clone'? I can see you can do this using the 'selection brush' for say sensor spots on a plain sky or even painting over sheep ear tags ditto and getting texture back with 'add grain/noise'...but the latter takes quite a lot of time compared to 'stamp', do you have another trick up your sleeve?

Here is now to remove dust spots in NX, although I find it much easier to use the healing tool or clone stamp in Photoshop.

http://nikoneurope-en.custhelp.com/c...i=&p_topview=1

Hope that enormous link works :D

Thanks once again Stephen - yes the link works fine and adds some good detail to my intuitive experiments.....but as you say it seems quicker elsewhere for all but the simplest ops.

From that link I now have the 'advanced search' bookmarked and this unlocks a huge library of previous Q&A and I think allows new questions

Maybe in 1.4 we will have a stamp tool & if I ask enough questions about print layout, a better print layout dialogue :rolleyes:

I decided to risk poking the 'later version available' button despite having read on the Nikon site that NX 1.3 needed mac OS10.4. So I am now running 1.3.0 (SPM version whatever that means) on 10.3.9. Although the interface at first looks identical, prog is 3x the size and presumably a large amount of re-write. Homework to be done on implication of using 'picture control' or 'non-picture control'. There also seem to be locks on some control point sliders. Off to Nikon advanced search!

Anyway in case anyone else is thinking no point in moving on from 1.2, there is, in that one might as well get used to the latest rather than invoking a partial re-learn.

Although no expert I believe v1.3 is not approved for 10.5 (Leopard). I have been running v1.3 since its launch without problem on an Intel Mac. I am sure v1.3 is good on all OS X versions prior to 10.5. The issue is a risk of corrupting NEF files when saving from v1.3 in 10.5.

I have refrained from moving towards 10.5 because of this issue as I only tend to edit photos on my home computer.