1. A printer, comprising: a printing unit including a print media advance system and a print media advance driver arranged to produce a printout from image-representing print data of an image to be printed; and a processing unit including a processor coupled to a machine readable medium, the processing unit coupled to the printing unit and the medium containing instructions that when executed by the processor perform the tasks of: the print media advance driver; and processing image-representing input data of the image so as to generate the image-representing print data, including further instructions for: separating the image into a line detail sub-image containing edge and line details, and an area detail sub-image containing area details; performing a first printing mode processing pipeline on the line detail sub-image and performing a second, different printing mode processing pipeline on the area detail sub-image; and generating multi-layer print mask data by mapping each sub-image into multiple masking levels representing a number of drops fired in a printing cell at a given level when producing a printout from the image, wherein each sub-image is mapped separately into four different masking levels, comprising mapping the image-representing print data of the line detail sub-image to masking levels 0 and 1 , and mapping image-representing print data of the area detail sub-image into levels 0 , 2 and 3 , wherein no drops per printing cell are fired at level 0 , 1 drop per printing cell is fired at levels 1 and 2 , and 2 drops per printing cell are fired at level 3 , and wherein at least one print mask data layer is usable to print the line detail sub-image in at least one line detail print pass, and the remaining, at least one, of the print mask data layers usable to print the area detail sub-image in at least one area detail print pass.