Best way to print photos

[Bob Johnson]

On 3/31/06, M. Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> In message: <54db43990603310652q1e40c699kd4f48702f27f33ab at mail.gmail.com>
>             "Bob Johnson" <fbsdlists at gmail.com> writes:
> : On 3/31/06, M. Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> : > Let us suppose that I have a HP DeskJet 5850 that I can talk to via
> : > CUPS.  I can print test pages w/o any problem.
> : >
> : > What are my options to print photos and what kind of quality can I
> : > expect relative to Windows?
> : >
> :
> : According to
> http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-DeskJet_5850,
> : HP's HPIJS driver gives "excellent" photo quality with HP printers.
> : One reviewer says that the quality at high resolution isn't quite as
> : good as Windows, but it isn't clear whether that means high-resolution
> : "normal" mode, or photo mode, or both.
> :
> : ports/print/foomatic-db-hpijs and  /ports/print/hpijs
>
> Bob,
>
> Thanks for the tips.  I have these ports installed, but am tripping
> over something stupidly basic: what converts the pict0001.jpg into
> something that can be fed to the hpijs driver that will print?
>
> Warner
>

In principle, an application feeds it to CUPS, CUPS feeds it to
GhostScript, and GhostScript uses the HPIJS driver to print it. Or
something like that.  In practice, I use APSFILTER instead of CUPS,
and I haven't ever tried to do photo printing from FreeBSD, although
getting my wife's HP photo printer working with FreeBSD is on my list
of things to do this weekend, or next weekend, or maybe the weekend
after that.

The process works for printing JPEGs from web pages on my laser
printer (although not with HPIJS), and since the HPIJS driver is
supposed to autodetect photo paper in your printer, I would expect it
to "just work" for photos if you can print a web page with it.

As for a specific application, The Gimp knows something about printing
photos, but again, I haven't actually done it.   Digikam also looks
very promising as a photo manipulation tool.  Anything that can
display it and knows how to print ought to do it (kview for example?).
I'm sure someone with actual experience can provide a more complete
answer.    ;-)

So far, I've printed from the Gimp by writing the file to a USB
thumbdrive, and plugging that into the photo printer.  The Gimp will
let you define the picture dimensions in inches, which may be
necessary to get the printing results you want.  Otherwise you may end
up with a picture that is 1 x 1.5 inches, or one point by one point,
or a piece of an 8x10 printed on 4x6 paper, or any of several other
possible defaults I've managed to print in the past.  Some printers
also do bad things if the image has too many pixels (or maybe bytes),
so I've sometimes needed to reduce the image resolution before
printing.

- Bob