For what it's worth, yeah I can make my own separations from Photoshop or any of the sep programs and for in house costs they work well when a customer is not willing to pay much for that skill. But in the hands of a good separator the art can come alive. I don't do my own seps for our show shirts since Tom at Motion Textile dials them in far better. When you have a high ticket client willing to pay for quality art and good separation work it can take the print to another level, especially in the sim process area. The sharpness, colors and impact of the print really improve in the hands of someone who does separations for a living. Some do great in house work, but if your skills are marginal like mine, take it to a good separator and let him know all the specifics of your job.
Very important to let them know what shirt you are printing on, inks used, press capability, reference colors (like Coca Cola Red for instance), and mesh counts. All the info you would want to know up front to prevent, moire, preserve color, and to produce the best print you can from the start. Nothing more frustrating then finding your seps moire in print, the customer doesn't see the reference colors they provided and endless other subjective art judgments that can turn it into a trial and error with marginal sep skills. Other key areas that help is to calibrate your monitor and printer so they render color well for your separator to see in a printout and for your customer to see so they have an approximation before seps and print are done. Convert to CYMK before printing. Eye One is a good monitor spectrophotometer that can calibrate both your monitor and printer. Even with monitior and printer in tune, they are just a communication point for all involved with the print being the final approval.
The final print may not even need sep modification. You can bring out many more secondary and tertiary colors by adding halftone base in 1% amounts to create translucency. (Keep track of your clear base addtions by using a gram scale and creating a recipe for the ink. This speeds up any reorders. All modified inks should have the recipe on the side since it will be outside of your Pantone system. Inks can still retain some opacity but mix better with each other to create more subtle color and allow details to come out with the addition of halftone base. We modified a Lord of the Rings promo banner for the movie's opening for 8 hours (Huge print run, well worth the time spent as we got 3x reorders for this 20k order). We added clear half tone base which prints sharper than regular base and is very clear to achieve many, many more colors and shades then was present in the first print sample.
Al
