Tirage
Digital negatives and fine-art printing, without the curve editing
Tirage is a family of Mac applications for photographers who print. It measures how your printer, ink, paper, and process actually respond, then corrects, soft-proofs, lays out, and prints from that measurement. It works with standard Epson and Canon drivers, and requires no Photoshop and no QuadToneRIP. For printers loaded with gray or custom ink sets, TirageRIP is the family’s own driver.
The applications
TirageDN
Digital negative software
Measure how your process responds, get the correction that linearizes it, soft-proof honestly against real paper white and maximum black, and lay negatives out on film — through the printer and driver you already have.
TiragePrint
Print layout studio
Exact margins, true trim marks, and four explicit color paths including none at all. Every print is recorded with its actual driver settings, so the reprint you make next year is the same print.
TirageProfiler
ICC profile creation
Build custom paper profiles from measurement files your own spectrophotometer software writes. The neutral axis is exact by construction, which is what keeps black and white and toned prints clean.
TirageRIP
Print driver for gray and custom ink sets
A macOS print driver for Epson printers loaded with gray or custom ink sets. It prints a grayscale image through a profile, one curve per ink, exactly as written, and takes QuadToneRIP’s place: existing .quad files print through it unchanged.
TirageFlex
Black and white camera for iPhone · free
Shoot black and white through the filter rather than converting afterwards. Yellow, orange, and red contrast filters rendered live in the viewfinder as true channel mixing, with gesture-driven exposure and contrast.
What holds it together
The process file
A .tdn file carries your whole alternative process — the printer,
the media, the blocking color, and the measured tonal and color response of
your materials.
That is why a measurement taken with a phone can drive a negative printed at the desk, and why a calibration made once keeps behaving like itself months later. Every application in the family reads and writes the same file.
Which application does what?
The desktop applications share one measurement and printing core, TirageRIP is the driver underneath them, and each owns a different part of the workflow.
| Application | What it is | Who it is for | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|---|
| TirageDN | Digital negative software | Alternative-process printers using a standard Epson or Canon driver |
Does not open or modify .quad files
|
| TiragePrint | Print layout, color, and job history | Photographers making editions, and printmakers who cut to marks | Does not build correction profiles |
| TirageProfiler | Color ICC profile creation | Photographers who profile their own papers, especially for toned work | Does not produce digital negatives |
| TirageRIP | Print driver for Epson printers with gray or custom ink sets |
Black-and-white printers running dedicated gray inks, including QuadToneRIP
users with .quad files
| Does not color-manage, invert, or correct the image |
| TirageFlex | Black and white camera for iOS | Photographers who want to see the filter before the exposure | Does not print |
Do I need QuadToneRIP?
No. Tirage is built for photographers using the standard printer driver, and that is the whole point of it — you do not need to install or learn QuadToneRIP to get a linearized digital negative.
If you already use QuadToneRIP and want direct control over
.quad files, ink limits, and partitioning, that is what the
QuadToneProfiler family is for. The two families share
a profile format, so measurements made in one are not stranded there.
The one place the family has its own driver is TirageRIP,
for Epson printers loaded with gray or custom ink sets. It does what QuadToneRIP did
for that kind of printing, your existing .quad files print through it
unchanged, and the two can stay installed side by side.