The most frequently used settings can be found on this index card.
Almost every printer offers several print modes. Generally, the higher the print quality the longer the printout will take. So you will probably choose a lower print quality for draft and test printouts and one of the highest qualities for the final printout.
Specify the medium you want to print on (i.e. the type of paper or a different media type like transparency, printable CD, etc.). Internally, TurboPrint chooses the appropriate color profile for this medium and adapts other printing parameters like printing speed, amount of ink, interleaving, etc.
To achieve a good color quality it is very important that you set the correct media type. As an alternative you can select a similar medium, e.g. “Inkjet Paper” for any matte coated inkjet paper or “Glossy” for any glossy or semi-glossy coated photo paper. But keep in mind that you can only obtain exact colors if the paper is supported directly.
Adding new papers
(only TurboPrint Pro / TurboPrint Studio):
You can further improve the color quality – especially if your preferred paper is not supported directly – with an individual TurboPrint color profile for your printer and your preferred paper by the ZEDOnet profile measuring service. Read more about individual color profiles in the description of the TurboPrint printer profiles section “ 10. Profiles - color profile administration" .
Pictures and photos can contain millions of different colors, but printers normally can only print with black and three (or up to eight) different ink colors. It is therefore necessary to create intermediate colors or shades of gray either by mixing the ink colors and/or by applying certain dithering patterns to produce the illusion of more colors than the printer actually provides. To accurately represent all colors, TurboPrint supports three different dithering patterns:
Error Diffusion (recommended setting for inkjet printers)
This diffuse pattern tries to eliminate any visibly noticeable geometrical pattern. Even fine details are reproduced. As the distribution of the dots requires a lot of processing power, the printout time is higher than with the Ordered patterns.
Ordered fine
The dot pattern is similar to those used for newspapers printing. In this mode printouts are not as smooth as with the Error diffusion pattern but significantly faster.
Ordered coarse (best pattern for laser printers)
This pattern is not as fine as the other “Ordered” pattern and is therefore better suited for laser printers as these printers have difficulties in producing a homogeneous printout with fine patterns.
This setting is only available for certain printers to control printer specific options, e.g.
black or color print head inserted in the printer
4-color printhead or 6-color photo printhead used
matte black or photo black ink cartridge used
gloss optimizer on or off
normal or economy print mode
Use this slider to render the printout lighter or darker. The higher the value the brighter your printouts will get and vice versa.
Note: Only intermediate colors will be changed, black and white will remain unchanged - i.e. pure black will be printed as pure black, white as pure white. If you also want to brighten the black parts of a printout you can reduce the contrast with the control described next.
Use this slider to increase or decrease the contrast of your printout. With a decreased contrast white will stay unchanged, i.e. only dark colors will become brighter. With an increased contrast bright colors will become brighter and dark colors will become darker.
Increases / decreases the amount of applied ink. Hence the complete printout will become paler (move slider to „low“) or more intense.
A lower saturation is good print test prints and in cases where too much ink is applied. You can easily save ink with this slider, however this will result in visibly paler printouts – to save ink without that impact, preferably use the „ink control“ sliders.
A higher saturation can be used to get intenser colors on certain media that need a higher ink usage (e.g. some transparencies or printable CDs).
Attention: Inks might flow on the paper if too high saturation levels are used.