Cheaper LED's and a look into LCD for Exposure Split from Saati Screen Toaster Thread

[Full-SpectrumSeparator]

Drum print was printed with Murakami Static Stretch and glues, 225/S base, 350/S colors.

Do you happen to know the color count?

Was it separated automatically or manually? 

Also do you have the original image/art? 

I'm just curious, I love it, it is a great and very detailed and colorful print.   

There are times that something calls for it and you can really add in colors in ways so that its photographic but in the areas needed to give more and more detail with individual colors and zoomed in close, so I understand fully how and why you can and want to get prints that you can just hold in your hand and up close and still see amazing color/image/texture clarity,  but also it would be cool too if it was very few colors perhaps and just a finely detailed and printed halftone methods so its really mixed nice and gives that result.  However it was done the result looks awesome and impressive.

Thanks for all the input you've given and what you share with everyone, and for showing that print example and the technical stuff you get into is appreciated very much as well.

[ebscreen]

Drum print was printed with Murakami Static Stretch and glues, 225/S base, 350/S colors.

On MHM machines.

[ABuffington]

Thanks for the replies to the drum print.
This was hand separated and if I'm not mistaken an 11-12 color print.
Here is the original art I provided him.  I still like making a t-shirt now and then!
It's neat to go in a shop in some corner of the world and see a screen maker wearing one he picked up at a show or from my dealers.



One of the best things I ever learned in this business was to outsource.  We managed to grow our company by leaps and bounds using other company's skills.  So many great printers that sometimes it doesn't pay to reinvent the wheel.  We had a 6, 8, 12 color presses. but a job like this needs more heads, more flashes and so it was cheaper on high color count sim process to job it out.  That company found we had puff foil dialed in with discharge printing, so we shared business.  This is invaluable when you get overloaded with work, or the job is beyond your capabilities.  We eventually became merchandisers and after he closed due to health it led me to a Nike Sourcing job and all the great shops in the US and Central America.  Now I try to give back all the tricks I have learned from my shop and those that my printers are willing to share, some I won't share which are proprietary but golden. Tom at Motion, Pierre, Danny, Culture Studio, Morning Sun Shirt Company (which was my first comany I started and was sold to Kawi who has taken it incredilbe HSA printing), Mark Gervais from Ningbo in China, Techo Screen in El Salvador, are all great companies, and I'll bet there are many others here on the board that you need to know.  You could be a small printer and land a big fish that you could partner with these great companies and land a new customer and capability that is often proprietary.  I've tried duplicating Tom's seps by hand, and failed miserably.  Some of the shops I go into have continual R&D and ask the tough questions at shows from Mark Coudray, Lon Winters, myself and fellow printers then go on to improve it.  I couldn't touch the work from the companies I have mentioned above, they have it down, sometimes instead of beating them, join them and you too can offer product that can take years of hard R&D that never ends.

[Full-SpectrumSeparator]

Thanks for the replies to the drum print.
This was hand separated and if I'm not mistaken an 11-12 color print.
Here is the original art I provided him.  I still like making a t-shirt now and then!
It's neat to go in a shop in some corner of the world and see a screen maker wearing one he picked up at a show or from my dealers.



One of the best things I ever learned in this business was to outsource.  We managed to grow our company by leaps and bounds using other company's skills.  So many great printers that sometimes it doesn't pay to reinvent the wheel.  We had a 6, 8, 12 color presses. but a job like this needs more heads, more flashes and so it was cheaper on high color count sim process to job it out.  That company found we had puff foil dialed in with discharge printing, so we shared business.  This is invaluable when you get overloaded with work, or the job is beyond your capabilities.  We eventually became merchandisers and after he closed due to health it led me to a Nike Sourcing job and all the great shops in the US and Central America.  Now I try to give back all the tricks I have learned from my shop and those that my printers are willing to share, some I won't share which are proprietary but golden. Tom at Motion, Pierre, Danny, Culture Studio, Morning Sun Shirt Company (which was my first comany I started and was sold to Kawi who has taken it incredilbe HSA printing), Mark Gervais from Ningbo in China, Techo Screen in El Salvador, are all great companies, and I'll bet there are many others here on the board that you need to know.  You could be a small printer and land a big fish that you could partner with these great companies and land a new customer and capability that is often proprietary.  I've tried duplicating Tom's seps by hand, and failed miserably.  Some of the shops I go into have continual R&D and ask the tough questions at shows from Mark Coudray, Lon Winters, myself and fellow printers then go on to improve it.  I couldn't touch the work from the companies I have mentioned above, they have it down, sometimes instead of beating them, join them and you too can offer product that can take years of hard R&D that never ends.

Can I print it as an example for educational purposes only and show manual/automated separation methods and the sep/halftone/print results?   It might be fewer or the same number of colors depending on the level-of-detail and color-tone-detail-level I want to maintain.

Was there black used do you know or was it the shirt color?

There are products available to the industry that have been created which took years of hard R&D work that never ends, and hundreds of shops are using those products to print this level of art with automated methods developed by a professional manual color separator with years of experience, and I have been talking with Mark Coudrey for years about all of this as well, we don't communicate very often, but he informed me that I was on the right path with HSB and about all the other variables at work with the inks and gamut-mapping etc, and I share with him my research and progress.   We aren't like long-term friends or anything but I am no stranger to these persons and companies you are mentioning.   I have been trying to learn and study all I could from all the greatest in the industry for 12 years... I found a lot of stuff that worked and a lot that didn't make any sense at all and had to struggle to work my way out of those confusing aspects into more logical and repeatable workflows.   

I was informed by Alvy Ray Smith in our correspondence that my research and development of the HWB color model is farther than he thought about it and encouraged by him to continue my work in these areas, as he is busy working on his book "The Biography of the Pixel". 

  This R&D into color models and color-processing and selection/masking/separation, halftone dithering (which I am now writing my own halftone algorithms and know how to work with existing index and mapping techiques, have written an expanded color model and processing directly at the RGB pixel-mapping level,  object and shape recognition not just color-processing and separation) - and in some niche areas the outputs of color separation and halftone for things like screenprinting... it is way more than just a screenprinting color-separation thing.   But the cool part is this came out of the needs of an artist/color-separator/screenprinter to have tools and understanding that worked more reliably and makes more sense, etc.    We use white inks over dark backgrounds a lot more than most other print processes, we use black inks and white inks together a lot... with bright colors of various hues - some custom colors of course -- but HWB is the best color model for our understanding of color and working with it in many ways not just for screenprinting... it just naturally unravels into all other aspects of color and how it is thought about, discussed, and utilized.   This entire journey I am on is about much more than screenprinting R&D.    I wish there was a lot less of this closed-minded mentality that somehow these amazing screenprint companies and screenprint R&D guys have solved everything already and nothing new can be innovated and that color theory and science doesn't apply to this process at all.  You wouldn't be printers today using the computers and graphics applications and color processing images from RGB using alpha masks and color image processing algorithms without the work of much more than the screenprint guys - consider the work of Alvy Ray Smith and then whether or not there is perhaps a lot more to come from developments based on his work and others that apply to screenprint as well as other areas.....  we would be good to learn and extend the work of more than just the giants of screenprint, especially if it applies to our processes in very useful ways that improve our bottom-line.    All of the technical stuff aside,  what I have seen in both research and actual results is a major impact to the bottom line of anyone using the techniques either manually or automatically...   artists spend more time creating art,  print and screen guys make seps and screens in minutes that surpass what the artists could do anyway spending hours, and the print results can even use less ink colors or more if you want - but in logical ways and for detail/color tone reasons,  and for the large shops this means millions of dollars of savings in labor and ink and usage etc.    It is not just some new stuff that is only theory and unpracticed...  a lot of the things I've brought to the table and developed and released have and continue to help hundreds of print shops do what used to only be considered capable if you had my pro-separator level of experience and years of skill and "eyes" etc... that is all not true because I put the methods logically into automations that are repeatable.  Yes there is still some user input and quality-control needed etc.   But sometimes I think what people call "manual" and "automated" could be the same steps just one is happening automatically, the other by a precise human operator.. like comparing manual printing to automatic.   I know in my experience I can print on manual the same quality and accuracy as an auto... it will just take longer. 

It is a good thing to realize that what was once considered to be absolute can quickly become obsolete. 

[blue moon]

Thanks for the replies to the drum print.
This was hand separated and if I'm not mistaken an 11-12 color print.
Here is the original art I provided him.  I still like making a t-shirt now and then!
It's neat to go in a shop in some corner of the world and see a screen maker wearing one he picked up at a show or from my dealers.



One of the best things I ever learned in this business was to outsource.  We managed to grow our company by leaps and bounds using other company's skills.  So many great printers that sometimes it doesn't pay to reinvent the wheel.  We had a 6, 8, 12 color presses. but a job like this needs more heads, more flashes and so it was cheaper on high color count sim process to job it out.  That company found we had puff foil dialed in with discharge printing, so we shared business.  This is invaluable when you get overloaded with work, or the job is beyond your capabilities.  We eventually became merchandisers and after he closed due to health it led me to a Nike Sourcing job and all the great shops in the US and Central America.  Now I try to give back all the tricks I have learned from my shop and those that my printers are willing to share, some I won't share which are proprietary but golden. Tom at Motion, Pierre, Danny, Culture Studio, Morning Sun Shirt Company (which was my first comany I started and was sold to Kawi who has taken it incredilbe HSA printing), Mark Gervais from Ningbo in China, Techo Screen in El Salvador, are all great companies, and I'll bet there are many others here on the board that you need to know.  You could be a small printer and land a big fish that you could partner with these great companies and land a new customer and capability that is often proprietary.  I've tried duplicating Tom's seps by hand, and failed miserably.  Some of the shops I go into have continual R&D and ask the tough questions at shows from Mark Coudray, Lon Winters, myself and fellow printers then go on to improve it.  I couldn't touch the work from the companies I have mentioned above, they have it down, sometimes instead of beating them, join them and you too can offer product that can take years of hard R&D that never ends.

I'll second this and to further drive Al's point, I'll say that we spent $10,000 and 1,000 hours on screens/stencil R&D! That's six months of doing nothing but working on screens eight hours each day.

We pretty regularly print for other screen printers when there is something they can't do. I'd also add that we are nowhere close to what some of the other shops mentioned are doing! Anybody that has an opportunity should check out Tom's prints, they are insane!

Pierre

[Full-SpectrumSeparator]

So if I spend $10,000.01 and 1000 hours plus a minute on screens/stencil R&D can I come back and post?

[tonypep]

Don't know and I am known to set aside some time for R&D but it appears some people have a whole lot of time on there hands

[Frog]

Don't know and I am known to set aside some time for R&D but it appears some people have a whole lot of time on there hands

To be fair and perhaps also add some perspective, Pierre's screen/stencil study is cramming a lot into a much shorter time in the industry than you have spent.

[ABuffington]

Yes a black was used in the print.  One trick that I found very useful to get the most out of sim process was halftone base.  This method however can create a lot of inks that can't be stored accurately by pantone number and they will lose opacity.  Basically on press we kept a five of halftone base nearby and added it sparingly to the color overprints. Usually less than 10% and more often than not below 5% added halftone base.  It can't be done by numbers.  It is done by eye as it is printed.  This sometimes added a half an hour and a lot of printed pellons and scrap shirts, but the eye can see on press what we can't see in the sep process, although opacity in channels helps preview, the wet onto wet process can step on the first down colors 6-7 times. Adding halftone base brings out a lot more color than just dropping in pantone matched inks.  Works with 4/C process as well if one color is too strong.  The secondary and tertiary colors in sim process created by overlapped/interlocking colors with added ink transparency helped achieve better sim process for us.  No matter how good the separations we found adjusting transparency helped the wet onto wet printing achieve better color transition.  In large production shops doing this to the ink can create an ink inventory nightmare.  Also for long runs it is hard to get consistency.  We did this on run lengths where we knew the amount of ink to print 600-1200 shirts was in the screen to begin with and any remaining ink was added to a black mix  drum.

For anyone wanting to play with the drum art or guitar art to play with PM me. 

Sorry this all led to the hijacking of the thread, but a lot of good info here on seps and exposure. Screen Printing's final product is a moving target, art complexity, sep technique, on press tweaks of inks, squeegee settings, all contribute to the print and we work in a subjective industry where beauty is in the eye of the beholder, unless your a screen printer.  Then you pinch the print, stretch it, get out a loupe to see either how it was done or how it could be better.  Constant improvement of techniques and product selection make all the difference.

Al