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Discharge print, preflight color sequence advice

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squeegee:
We're getting set to print this design in all discharge colors, what you see is the design without the white text drop shadowed in black (to protect the innocent :)).  The text will large and centered on the design.

It's a 9 color, dark purple, lt purple, royal, yellow, orange, red, burgundy, black and white.

We are very new to printing all discharge, so I was wondering if anyone might be able to reccomend a print order for the colors.  I was thinking of putting the reds closer to the end based on a couple previous prints.  Intially I'm thinking we'll run everything on 150S mesh, WOW, double stroking each color, we can flash once if needed.   Garments are dark Gildan's that have an A discharge rating.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

tonypep:
Purples and blues first, orange, dark red, yellow bright red last. Remember on that bright red try around 4% activator.......you can always add more
tp

Dottonedan:
Following what Tony said,  my discharge sep customers prefer me to print with the darkest colors down first.  Dark to light.  The reason I would guess is that they don't want the lighter colors to get contaminated early on and as well as wanting them to not get picked up...so they remain a full saturation and brightness.  They didn't tell em that. Thats just a guess.

In addition or as a side note, Those don't look like they need to be "exact color matches". You could take out at least 2 color and possibly 3.

Dark Purple, Burgundy and Orange can be mixed.  Now, with discharge (and those consistent areas of color), they may cause it to be trickier than I indicated. Sim process discharge separation is a tad trickier than regular sim process.

tonypep:
Actually Dan you are right and perhaps just a tad not right. Discharge and waterbased inks may be printed as 100% solid overprint colors wet on wet to create secondary and tertiary colors without using halftones. This is something the ink companies don't know (or tell).
The discharge pre-print line I worked on exploited this as much as possible. Red/yellow=orange etc. Since these designs would go to press sometimes several times per week this a huge savings in screens/ink/time. Quite often a graphic that visually contained six colors were/are printed using only four.
If anyone wants to experiment just make up some two inch circles on three screens being sure they overlap to form a triangle. Next add a non imaged screen that has been exposed. This is your crush screen. Using singly pigmented primary discharge colors play around with combinations; being sure to put some clear base in the crush screen and print it last (not always necessary).
There are, of course limits and some rules of thumb ie lighter colors print first. And opaque inks with any white ink or PC don't work well. We actually took it to an even higher level by making color books depicting the end results of overprinting colors. Since we did our own design work we used the books to better produce a more cost effective line.
When it comes to discharge sim process on darks Dan is dead on. The truly good separators (for darks) create a halftone underbase that yield different shades and tints of a given color as well as mix halftones to create different hues. With discharge you throw the underbase out........so now you totally half to re-engineer the graphic. I have some samples but no Photoshop on the new computer so can't compress files but if you like Pierre I can send it to you and you can post

Evo:
If it were me, dark to light with white last. Red w/ 4% activator max. Red halftones overprinting the yellow for the secondary orange. No white underbase, all printing direct wet on wet.

On darks I try to lay the lighter colors later so they don't get stepped on too hard. They come out much brighter.

No double strokes. Tight screens, firm floods, medium pressure prints.

With the red halftone, count on high dot gain and compensate for it.

So,

155mesh:
Black
Dk purple
Lt purple
Burgundy
Blue

230mesh:
Yellow
Red (50lpi halftone @ 22.5 overprint for the orange areas)
White


YMMV.

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