spot color separation for screen printing

Your halftones can range from 35lpi to 65 lpi. I recommend using a RIP (raster image processor) to print halftones. In the pop up print dialog box select separations instead of letting the printer or Photoshop manage colors. When you have all the colors separated your ready to print out of Photoshop.Follow all the above steps to 'pull' each color in your design to it's own spot color channel.A White Underbase channel should be set to an opacity of 85% - 90%.

In the color box at the bottom of the pop up window you can change the color of the channel to your sampled color you selected. Double click your new channel and change it from an Alpha Channel to a Spot Color Channel.At the bottom of the Channels Panel is a small icon, a rectangle with a circle in the middle, click that and your color is now Saved as a New Channel.After you have the amount of color you would like to pull/separate- select the invert box. Using the Fuzziness Slider you can select more or less of a particular color hue. The Eye Dropper Tool will pop up with a dialog box with a slider. Go to Select Regardless of how the Channels palette is displaying the channels, when two or more channels are visible, the image window always displays color (lower samples).Learn how to do a basic spot color separation inside Photoshop for outputting film positives for screen printing t-shirts.Ĭolor Separations in Photoshop - Channel Separations When channels are displayed in color and a single channel is visible, it is displayed in its own color both in the palette and in the image window (upper-right). When two or more channels are visible in the Channels palette, the display is always color.Īs you can see, when the channels are displayed in gray and a single channel is visible, it appears that way both in the palette and in the image window (upper-left). The Preferences enable you to display each channel in color (which generally makes it much more difficult to see the details of the Cyan and Yellow channels). When you view a single channel on-screen in Photoshop, it displays, by default, as gray. But what if you want to print the channels in color, say as samples for a screenprinter? That takes a few more steps.Įach color channel in an 8-bit CMYK image is actually a grayscale representation of the image. It’s easy to see individual channels in color in Photoshop’s Channels palette - simply select “Color Channels in Color” in Preferences> Display & Cursors.

Spot color separation for screen printing