By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, September 05, 2007 - 3:50:01

http://www.proofmaster.net

Commercial photographers and large photo studios need to be able to manage their printing workflow and set up colour profiles that manage ink limiting and basically control the printer’s inks individually. ProofMaster 3.x is a Raster Image Processor (RIP) that does this and more. It is said to be the best RIP available, and we tested it for you.

ProofMaster 3.x is a RIP product developed by PerfectProof. Founded in 1996 by John Weissberg and Mark Verbist, formerly at Scitex and Kodak, PerfectProof offers a complete range of products for digital proofing, high-end photo and large format printing and e-commerce solutions for graphic professionals. ProofMaster 3.1 is the latest version of this RIP.

Using ProofMaster proved to be very straightforward, with little surprises when it came to workflow management. This is indeed a complete and high-level printing workflow product, but the general comments people make about RIPs --they are difficult to set up, difficult to work with, etc-- do not apply to ProofMaster in my opinion. At least not when using the product to print. Setting colour profiles is an entirely different matter.

The benefits of using a RIP

Photographers, especially those who work in larger studios with multiple printers, will benefit most from ProofMaster because of two reasons:

- The ProofMaster workflow features ensure a job queue that ensures the printers deliver continuously

- The ProofMaster colour controls enable the photographer to print to any kind of printing media with a 100% accuracy of colour rendering.

Setting up a printer in ProofMaster 3.1 is easy to do. You are taken through a number of steps --preferences, really-- that determine how the printer will output its jobs, and which extra information it will deliver in the margin of the print. Each printer ends up with its own Queue window.

Each printer queue can hold many different paper or other media types. Except for different media, each queue can be set to a different RIPping mode as well. This allows you to use your printer as a photo printer for those jobs that require it, and for proofing a screen print at another occasion. ProofMaster is being developed in the US and in Europe, and therefore is capable of RIPping for different purposes, including EnFocus Certified PDF.

Commercial photographers will furthermore like the ability to backup and restore a complete queue, including the colour settings and profiles, so that when the system would crash, a restore gets them up and running again in a matter of minutes. Nevertheless, ProofMaster is best run on a dedicated machine, especially when it has to handle multiple queues. However, if you are for example an individual art photographer, you can run ProofMaster on your production machine without a problem. 

Colour Settings with ProofMaster

We tested it both on a production machine and a dedicated Power Mac G5 and found it performed equally well, although the RIP of course takes away some more CPU resources than you might be willing to sacrifice when it’s RIPping complex pages. Also, the colour setup is quite elaborate and doesn’t bare the software to be quit while you’re busy creating a colour profile. During that time (it can take a whole day during which the RIP sits idle mostly as inks have to dry) the RIP must stay open.

If you suffer a crash and must restart your machine during that period, you might have to start over again.

In the area of workflow support, ProofMaster has a print-to-queue feature and hot folder functionality. Printing photographs can be done using the virtual printer driver that is automatically created for you separately for each queue (which is one printer), dropping a TIFF, JPEG, PNG, or PDF (and a couple of other formats as well) onto the hot folder, or dropping these files onto the media icon in the queue window. The RIP will immediately start RIPping and printing.

Very interesting for photographers is the capability to rotate jobs automatically and to nest images. Some licenses of ProofMaster come with a full copy of ProofMaster Editor, which allows you to create output templates, so that contact sheet templates can be used. Contrary to plain nesting of images, a photographer or a photo studio can place their logo on the sheet, and arrange the images as required.

Colour Management for Photo Users is the next issue in this review series.