15.1. Ghostscript and Photos
15.1. Ghostscript and Photos
Ghostscript has some difficulties rendering color photographs
through most drivers. The problems are several:
-
Many drivers have poorly tuned color support. Often the
colors don't match the Windows driver output or the screen.
OTOH, all drivers, and Ghostscript as a whole, have readily
adjustable color support; the "Gamma" settings (seeSection 10.2.2) are one thing
to play with, and there are others documented in Ghostscript'sUse.htm documentation file.
-
I'm only aware of one Ghostscript driver with support for 6
and 7 color printing; it's in beta at the moment and supports
most Epson Stylus Photo models. It is rumored to produce
better color than the Windows driver (!). The Ghostscript
driver core itself provides no support for non CMYK or RGB
colors; arguably, some work to put that there is needed.
-
Ghostscript often ends up dithering coarsely, or generating
printouts with artifacts like banding. The dithering can
usually be corrected; see Section 10.2.3, and read
the documentation for your driver.
You should be able to correct some of these problems by tuning
Ghostscript; see
Section 10 for more
information on how to do this. Fiddling with Ghostscript options
is much easier if you declare them as options in your spooling system.
That said, the obvious solution for now is to use non-Ghostscript
software for printing photos, and indeed, such things do exist.
The main contender is the print plugin in the Gimp, which supports
pixel-for-pixel printing on Epson Styluses and Postscript printers
(with basic PPD support). That Epson Stylus portion of that
driver is available for Ghostcript, as well, as thestp driver. Also possible to use for this
purpose are the assorted external pnm-to-foo programs used to
print on printers like the cheap Lexmarks; these print attempt to
print pixmaps pixel-for-pixel.
The best solution, of course, is to buy a Postscript printer;
such printers can usually be completely controlled from available
free software, and will print to the full capability of the
printer.
