I had a long pause after finishing the first trilogy and before starting this one, because I was not looking forward to the jump in time and change of protagonists.

So this was basically a fresh start. I enjoyed it even more than the previous book in the series. It was a lot more vague on the details of how the imaging magic works, but then again we were following a protagonist who did not know that much about it himself. So it ended up working fine within the book, but having prior knowledge from the previous books felt like a nice benefit.