Printing Contact Sheets and Full Size Images

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To print contact sheets, switch to thumbnail view and select the thumbnails to be printed. To print full size images switch to main view.

Page and Printer Setup

First use the Print Setup dialog to select the printer, paper size and orientation. Then use the Page Setup dialog (shown below) to control how images are printed. The units for the various measurements will be shown in mm or inches depending on your computer settings.

The page margins section defines the size of the printing area on the page for both contact sheet printing and for printing full size images. To use the full printing area available set the margins to 0. Set the left margin to a larger value (e.g. 15mm) if you intend to punch holes in the paper to store it in a ring binder.

Most printers cannot print right to the edge of the paper and when the page margins are outside the printing area BreezeBrowser will adjust them to fit automatically.

The "Swap left and right margins when printing even pages" option is useful when printing on double sided paper with a duplex printer when you want have a larger margin on one side of the page for binding e.g. If the left margin is set to 25mm and the right margin is set to 5mm the first page will have a 25mm left margin, the second page will have a 5mm margin etc.

Use the "Background" dropdown list to specify the page background. The default setting is "None". When the background is set to "Color" the page will be filled with the selected color. Click on the "..." button to select a different color. The background can also be set to a background image. The background image is assumed to be 240dpi (i.e. a 240x240 pixel image will be output as a 1 inch square) and is tiled to fill the page.

Please note: The default color for the caption and footer text is black. If you select a dark background for the page you may need to change the text color for it to be visible. To do this click on the "Caption Font..." or "Footer Font..." button and select a new text color.

Printing Contact Sheets

To print contact sheets you must first switch to thumbnail view and select the images you want to be printed. Then select Print Preview to preview the printed pages or Print to print the pages.

Use the Page Setup dialog to adjust the layout of the contact sheet. The "Thumbnail columns" and "Thumbnail rows" settings control the number of thumbnails that are printed on each page and "Spacing between thumbnails" specifies the gap between each thumbnail.

Select "Add border" if to add a thin black border around the images. Normally images look better with a border, but if the images have been prepared with a border or frame already (e.g. a drop shadow effect) the border added during printing can be turned off.

The thumbnail images can be rotated so that they fit the page better by selecting one of the following options from the "Rotate Thumbnails:" dropdown list:

OFF - The thumbnails are not rotated and are printed as they appear in BreezeBrowser
To match page orientation - When the page orientation is landscape portrait thumbnails are rotated to landscape and landscape thumbnails are unchanged. When the page orientation is portrait landscape thumbnails are rotated to portrait and portrait thumbnails are unchanged.
To landscape orientation - Portrait thumbnails are rotated to landscape and landscape thumbnails are unchanged.
To portrait orientation - Landscape thumbnails are rotated to portrait and portrait thumbnails are unchanged.

Thumbnail images will be resized to fill the area available to them. This can result in portrait and landscape (vertical and horizontal format) images being different sizes. Click on the "Make portrait and landscape thumbnails the sames size" to prevent this happening. e.g. if the area available for printing the thumbnail is a rectangle 600 pixels wide by 400 pixels high and landscape thumbnail would fill this area whereas a portrait thumbnail would be resized to 267 x 400 pixels. If "Make portrait and landscape thumbnails the sames size" is selected the landscape thumbnail would be resized to 400 x 267 pixels to match the size of the portrait thumbnail.

Each thumbnail can have an optional caption printed below it. The default setting is "@file@" which prints the the filename of the image. You can use any of the tokens defined in the HTML Page Generation section to caption the image using EXIF shooting data extracted from the image. You can also insert "\n" to add a line break so that the caption is printed on more than one line.

Examples:

To print the image filename with the date the picture was taken on the line below:
@file@\n@date@

To print the image filename, shutter speed, aperture and ISO setting:
@file@\n@shutter@ sec @ f/@aperture@, ISO @iso@

To print the image filename and the lens focal length:
@file@\n@lens@mm @ @focalLength@mm

The font used for thumbnail captions can be changed by clicking on the "Caption Font..." button.

Each page can have an optional footer that is printed at the bottom of the page. If this is left blank no footer is printed and the space is made available for printing the thumbnails. The footer may contain the following tokens:

@dir@ - the full pathname of the directory containing the images e.g. C:\Photos\2003-09-28
@parent@ - then name of the directory containing the images e.g. 2003-09-28
@date@ - the date the contact sheet is printed (i.e. today's date)
@time@ - the time the contact sheet is printed
@page@ - the current page number
@numPages@ - the total number of pages necessary to print all the selected images
@volumeName@ - the name of the disk drive

The font used for footer text can be changed by clicking on the "Footer Font..." button.

Printing Full Size Images

To print an image full size you must first switch to main view and display the image to be printed. Then select Print Preview to preview the printed output or Print to print the image.

Use the Page Setup dialog to adjust the layout of the page. The output DPI setting specifies the number of dots (i.e. pixels) per inch output to the printer. For most inkjet printers a value of around 240dpi should produce good results. This value should not be confused with the resolution of the printer which may be between 1200 and 2880dpi (inkjet printers output different colors by "dithering" several ink dots and need many ink dots to accurately render the color of each pixel).

The "Resize image to fit page" checkbox tells BreezeBrowser what to do if the image is smaller than the printable area on the paper. If this value is unchecked the image will not be resized and its size will be determined by the size of the image and the output DPI setting e.g.
An image 1200x720 pixels with an output DPI setting of 240dpi will be printed as 5 inches (1200 pixels / 240dpi) by 3 inches (720 pixels / 240dpi).

If the "Resize image to fit page" checkbox is checked the image will be resized using high quality interpolation so that it fits the printable area at the specified output DPI. Taking the same image as the example above and printing on paper which has a printable area of 10 inches by 8 inches the image would be scaled by 200% to fit the page. The printed image will be 10 inches by 6 inches, printed at 240dpi (2400 pixels x 1440 pixels).

Use the "Image Placement" dropdown list to specify where the image will be printed on the page. "Top, left justified" will place the image in the top left corner of the printable area of the page. "Top justified" places the image at the top of the printable area and centers it between the left and right margins.

To print the image as large as possible set the image placement to "Center in printable area" and select "Resize image to fit page" and "rotate image to fit page".

Many printers have a maximum printing area which has larger margins at the top and bottom than at the left and right. If the maximum printing area is used (i.e. fit image to page is selected) this can result in an uneven margin around the image. To avoid this set the image placement to "Center on page" and BreezeBrowser will ensure that the top, bottom, left and right borders are all the same size.

Select "Rotate image to fit page" to fill the page with the image. When this option is selected BreezeBrowser will rotate the image if required so that it fills the page. e.g. when printing an image with landscape orientation when the printer is set to portrait orientation BreezeBrowser will rotate the image to portrait to make best use of the printable area.

For more control over the printed image use proofs to create images sharpened and resized as required.

Color Profiles

If a monitor and printer color profile are selected in Preferences BreezeBrowser will use these when displaying print preview and printing images. Color profiles can help to get consistent color displayed on screen and in printed output. It may be necessary to experiment with different printer settings to get the best results. For example, if you are using an Epson printer the Color Management in the driver settings should probably be set to "No Color Adjustment". A detailed discription of color profiles is beyond the scope of these help pages. Ian Lyon's site http://www.computer-darkroom.com has some excellent information on the use of color profiles.