Corel Painter Help | General notes on printing

General notes on printing

This section includes general information about printing images.

If you’re sending your images to a print service provider for printing, it is recommended that you first obtain proofs. You can use proofs from a black-and-white printer to check page size and image placement. Proofs from a color printer provide a general impression of what your final image will look like. Keep in mind that the proof is not an accurate representation of a final print produced by an offset printing process. The final output is affected by a combination of the print process, inks, and paper types used.

Color management is not enabled by default. If you want to use color management while working on or printing a document, you must first set up color management for your system. For more information, see Color management.

Printing shapes

In Corel Painter, you can interleave shapes with layers in the Layers panel, which can affect how your document is printed. Shapes are vector objects, as opposed to pixel-based objects, which makes them resolution-independent. On a PostScript printer, shapes are usually turned into PostScript paths and are printed at the full printer resolution.

When you use PostScript Level I or II to print shapes, some effects, such as transparency and certain composite methods, cannot be reproduced. You must rasterize the shapes on the canvas before printing.

Any object in a lower position in the Layers list "touched" by a rasterized shape must also be rasterized to preserve the effect. For example, if you have a shape with transparency on top of a number of other shapes, all shapes below it must be rasterized to preserve the transparency on the canvas even if the overlap area is small. Similarly, if part of an image from a layer is placed over a shape, the shape must be rasterized to be correctly printed.

If you want to print shapes at the full resolution of your printer, ensure that the shapes do not overlap with raster layers, that they are not transparent, and that their composite method is set to Default.

Printing composite images

Printing a composite image that contains many layers and shapes can be time-consuming. You can print a single-layer version of the image much more quickly.

Instead of flattening a composite image by dropping each layer to the canvas, you can clone the file to produce a flattened image, which you can then print. This method lets you preserve the layers in the saved RIFF file in case you want to change them later. For more information, see Cloning images.

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