"Changing image in mid-stream"

[Greybeard]

I'm not sure what to call it, but thinking of "how do you get a print run to personalise each print".

Say you have 100 run of a gift item, and want to include the name( or even a photo) of each recipient on it as part of the design.
This is just an example I've dreamt up to give you the idea.

I know top of the range printers can do such a thing, as years ago I saw it happen, but are there plugins or special printing software programs that will allow you do do this on any dye sub printer ?

John

EDIT The phrase "print merge" has just popped into my head, but I don't know if this what I'm looking for.

[WorthDoingRight]

Well you could use mailmerge if you put your image into say a word document and then mailmerged the name above it. This would probably be ok if your printer didnt use a custom icc profile - so maybe usuable best with powerdriver via a ricoh printer.

[Greybeard]

Good morning Richard,
and thanks for the input.
Not familiar with Powerdrive, so I'll have to get acquainted.

John

[WorthDoingRight]

Well Powerdriver is a Sawgrass addon for Ricoh printers using their sublimation cartridges to make printing from standard applications easier. It is their colour management software incorporated into what appears a standard printer driver. So any application that can print to a printer should get reasonable colour results.

Other printers tend to use a custom ICC profile as their method of achieving a good colour match and 'Paul' on here offers an ICC profiling service. However the issue is that to get the best results the software you are printing from has to be ICC profile aware and this limits the choices. A number of people create images in one or another software packages and then export as an image file such as a .png or .tif or .jpg and then print out via something like Qimage.

Richard

[neilb]

Photoshop can do this using variables, quite complicated to set up though.

[Greybeard]

Thanks for that, richard.
I've spent many years with CorelDraw 8 and PhotoPaint, and did most of my image colour adjustment the hard way (If SWMBO didn't like it, I changed it ), so it looks like another learning curve is on the cards.
John

[Greybeard]

Hi neilb, and thanks. With so many years using Corel, every time I tried Photoshop I panicked, and scuttled back , but this old dog is capable of learning new tricks, so who knows, perhaps I'll take another look.

John

[WorthDoingRight]

Well Photoshop is really a bitmap image editor whilst Coreldraw is vector image editor - so a bit like oil and water - if you shake them hard enough they seem to merge together - however they are not that similar.

[Greybeard]

Hi Richard, you overlooked my mention of PhotoPaint in #6, which is the photoediting part of the Corel bundle .
I started with Corel4 in win 95 more years ago than I care to remember, but I'm still open to learning new tricks.
Regards
John
EDIT Please keep the advice coming !