Learn all about Mirage
The Mirage User Interface
The General Settings
Selecting the Printer, the media you wish to print to and the print resolution. Once done, colormanagement is set up and you are ready to print.
The Paper Settings
If you ever printed to roll media you know how many steps need to be prepared in order to just use as little media as required. Using Mirage makes it very simple. Select your paper feed (cut sheet or roll), select a standard size or define one of your choice. That's it.
Borderless Printing: Mirage offers all borderless printing options available for your printer. The big advantage is obvious: The Mirage preview allows you full control over these settings - now you can see what parts of your image will be cropped.
Why resizing an image in Adobe Photoshop to print it right sized? Forget about the steps you have done in the past to enlarge or shrink before printing. Mirage makes life simple and printing to the desired size easy. The settings for Width / Height can be made in "cm", "Inches" or "%".
For many reasons you may want to add white borders to your image.
Well, doing so in Photoshop takes time and adds weight to your image
size.
Mirage makes that very smart and easy. Just add a border individually sized for top, bottom, right and left.
Boders may be added without beeing colored (white) or
they may contain mirrored parts of the image (ideal if the image was
printed to canvas and will be stretched onto a wooden frame). Selecting
"Epson Type" will automatically add the borders and crop marks required
for the "Youframe" © framing system.
Color up your borders. Select the border color from the color selector
or by using the color picker. The color picker allows you to "pick" the
clor for the border from your images - that way your borders will fit
100% the color of your image.
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To exactly position your image on the media using the printer driver is between very difficult and impossible. Mirage has all tools to provide you with powerful control to position your image on the media and allows you a preview of your settings on the fly.
If your printer supports advanced black & white printing mode
that might be the best choice for printing powerful images without
interfering colorshiftings. Although the standard printer driver
provides you with some control on advanced black and white printing you
do not have control over the results of your settings due to the lack of
a softproof.
Select your gray gamma and see effect (soft proof) on the selected mode in the "Print Preview" tab.
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"Simulate Paper White" allows you to preview the differences between the "lightening" colors your monitor shows and the "reflecting" colors of your prints.
Print marks are helpful for many reasons. Specially the crop marks are used quite often to support you cropping your image. Did you notice that the Photoshop cropmarks are not helping for the very most cases. You do one cut and the other crop marks are gone?
Mirage offers you among many other print marks "inward corner cropmarks" that will provide cropping help until your final cut.
The page preview / print preview provides full control on all settings you made for printing your file.
The "Page Preview" allows you to
control all settings that effect the image (like soft proof of all color
management settings, borders, print marks etc.
See all changes to the layout of your image in the "Print Preview" (like position on the media, alignment etc.) before you print them and risk a waste of media.
Use the "Document" window to manage you images for printings. Select / deselect images and set the number of copies.
We define "Instances" as different versions of one image. Make your settings per copy like print size, border settings etc.
As an example print one image 3 x in pass photo size plus 5 x in 2x3 inches...
Select how your images will be layouted automatically to
your media. The following options are available: "Optimize for minimal
waste", "Optimize for easier cutting", "One Copy per Sheet / Row" and
"Grid"
Grid is a smart way to create contact sheets with ease.
Simply define the number of Columns / Rows and Mirage will layout your
images into the grid...
Mirage now supports the cropping of images and pages
You can select the cropping area by either defining the disired size in cm/inch or % or using the interactive Mirage cropping window (to open the interactive cropping window click on "Crop..) Here you can make all relevant settings and the Mirage preview will display the effect on the fly.
Mirage provieds a powerful allgorithm to scale images and pages.In order to control if the desired scaling is providing a sufficiant output quality Mirage 1.6 offers informations that might display a warning if technically the output size is too big based on the original file.To active the informations select the "Show Information" marker located below the preview window.
The displayed warining shows the actual image resolution and right behind the sperator the optimal dpi resolution besed on the desired output size.
The backround of the warning message changes color between actual images resolution and desired output size.
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Selecting "Finest Details" will provide better print results for artifical lines like those beeing created in InDesign or Illustrator.
The new implemented option "Cut Twice" (double cut) enables you to cut the upper and lower end after each series.This means you cut into the printed area in order to create prints that are borderless on the top and bottom.