Album widget and Free Form

[tomczak]

I've never used Album before. I have a series of JPG scans of a book. I would like to produce a PDF with the JPGs as pages of one document.

So I created a workflow, that massages the JPGs and ends with Print/Create Album widget. I also have a PDF printer driver installed (I can pring to PDF).

When I set up the widget, there is a grayed Free Form button. Why is that? My hope was that I could print the JPG to PDFs without resampling the JPGs (which I think would happen when I specify the fixed pannel size). Is that true?

Also, I'm interested in printing one JPG per one PDF page, no margins. Is there an easy way of doing it in Album?

Many thanks for help!

[ksinkel]

Let me divide your question into two parts; 1) How to create an album with many images automatically. 2) How to use the album widget.

1. Automatic creation of an album with multiple images.

You can create An album filled with any number of images automatically from the browser. Select the images you want to add to the album. Then click the Album button in the browser panel. A dialog which allows you to choose image panel size and other parameter is displayed. Choose the panel size, etc and click OK. An album with all the selected images is automatically created.

Panel size controls how many images are placed on a page. The album places as many panels as will fit on the chosen page size. In addition to the standard panel sizes, you can also create custom ones. Specifically, to print borderless prints, you need to create a borderless custom template. The template would have one panel that is the size of the paper you plan to use.

Note that you can add more images to the album by dragging them from a browser or workflow window or opening them from the file manager.
To create a pdf file, print the album to a pdf driver rather than an actual printer.

2. Using the album widget

The Album widget is intended as an alternative output for the workflow. Thus you can terminate a workflow with an album widget instead of a file save widget. That way the editing that your workflow does can be directed to an album in a single step. All the settings described above are also available in the album widget.

The manual layout option is disabled in the album widget because there would be no way for the workflow to know how to place images in manual mode. However, after you create an album that was laid out automatically, you can select manual layout and make further adjustments manually.

Kiril

[tomczak]

Many thanks, Kiril! Could you also comment on how resampling and JPG compression work when an Album page is created and then printed to PDF?

Cheers!

[tomczak]

Do I understand it correctly: to create a borderless PDFs, one page per image, in addition to making the panel size the same as the page size, I would need to adjust the page width-to-height ratio to be the same as the pixel width-to-height ratio of the image(s) that I include in the Album?

If this is true, is there a way of printing to a PDF, borderlesly, a series of images with different shape ratios?

Also, I'm not sure if I understand if and when the resampling is done in such scenario (Image-->Album-->PDF).

For instance: if I have an original image that is 2000x3000 pixels, and I set the page and the panel physical dimensions to, say, 2m by 3m, the image should fit on the page borderlessly? But would the PDF driver then upsample or downsample the image somehow using some specified dpi factor? And will the images inside the PDF be stored as JPGs at some compression or PNGs, depending on the settings in the PDF driver?

[ksinkel]

Borderless printing requires that the paper size is the same size as the print. (That's just the definition of borderless.) However since usually the paper size is some standard size (like 8 x 10, 8 1/2 x 11, or whatever) and since paper sizes are generally not the same aspect ratio as the image, this generally requires cropping.

The album has various cropping and alignment options to accommodate this. After the photo is positioned automatically, it is easy to manually pan the image for best composition. There is also a full image option which will fill the frame without cropping. (Of course then you will have space at either the sides or top and bottom if there is an aspect ratio difference.)

Sub sampling in PDF is done by the PDF driver, not Picture Window. Usually the driver gives you various options so you can either optimize file size or quality.

Kiril

[Dieter Mayr]

Maciej,

Images in PDFs can have a variety of formats, but not a standard image format as JPEG or PCX.
You find details in this article:
http://blog.idrsolutions.com/2010/04/un ... es-stored/

I'm not sure if it principally possible to create a PDF with different page sizes with a PDF-Printer
(and this would be the case if you have lets say a 5"x7" image, next page a 8"x10" or so.).
One print job has generally one paper size it prints on, and a PDF-Printer is for the printing application nothing else then a printer.
On a normal (paper) printer it is also not possible to print in a single printshop to a A4 page and next to a A3 page.
You have to select the papersize before starting to print.
So the only solution I could think of now would be to print each image to it's own PDF and merge them together then (or to buy Adobe Indesign or a other layout program which should be able to do such things).

Hope it helps

[tomczak]

My images in the workflow are in A4 aspect ratio. The workflow ends with an Album widget. I'm trying to print to PDF, one image per page, borderless. I'm using PrimoPDF as a PDF printer driver.

Please take a look at the attached screenshots. Even though the Page and the Panel are specified to the A4 size, the page size seems to be: 216x279 and it does show margins. Pressing the Printer Setup button and trying to change the page size in the printer driver (it was set to A4) interestingly doesn't change the 216x279 value reported by PWP. What am I doing wrong?

Cheers!

[ksinkel]

I discovered a bug in second dialog you show. I will include a fix for it in the next release, which will be issued within about a week.

Kiril