trouble printing halftones through accurip from a jpg

[Stinkhorn Press]

Received a pencil drawing from a customer and would like to reproduce the shading using halftones via Accurip. Art was scanned in, cleaned up, and levels adjusted inside Photoshop. Then the image was sent to Illustrator to add some vector text. The problem is the image is outputting as a bitmap and not elliptical halftones.

I would like to know what the correct process is for getting what we need from beginning (scanned art) to end (correct output with smooth halftones vector text etc).

Thanks in advance!

[3Deep]

I know you know this already but I'll ask anyway, did you convert to spotcolors?  One more thing... I've had pencil drawings and the shading looked very good and I really wanted to keep it that way, so I would scan into photoshop add vector text and any other places I wanted a nice clean vector look, but would leave the pencil shade as is and printed that sep all black from cymk turn out very nice.  The halftone just didn't look as good as the original pencil shading.

[Doug B]

  Is it scanned in greyscale or black & white?

[Stinkhorn Press]

I know you know this already but I'll ask anyway, did you convert to spotcolors?  One more thing... I've had pencil drawings and the shading looked very good and I really wanted to keep it that way, so I would scan into photoshop add vector text and any other places I wanted a nice clean vector look, but would leave the pencil shade as is and printed that sep all black from cymk turn out very nice.  The halftone just didn't look as good and the original pencil shading.

Thanks for the reply- The channel was converted to a spot color before saving as an .eps.

The concern that we had was that we weren't sure if we could hold the image as a stencil without the larger halftone dots, we felt we would lose too much of the detail. Of course it would be nice to do both and compare.

As for the scan format, I believe it was greyscale but I'll rescan to be sure. The info box is showing variances of K% when scrolling over the image, not sure if that relates to scanning as b/w vs greyscale.

11:30 edit: image was scanned in as 16-bit greyscale.

[Sbrem]

I would normally scan the image and open into Photoshop, RGB or grayscale on this image won't matter much, so go grayscale, it's a smaller file size. Here's an option to try; make a duplicate file (leave the original alone) and convert to Bitmap mode, halftone, and try 40 line at a 22.5° angle, and either elliptical or round dots, OUTPUT RESOLUTION at 1200 ppi, it makes your dots much cleaner). Then you can "Place" it into Illustrator and assign the spot color there.

Steve

[Dottonedan]

I would normally scan the image and open into Photoshop, RGB or grayscale on this image won't matter much, so go grayscale, it's a smaller file size. Here's an option to try; make a duplicate file (leave the original alone) and convert to Bitmap mode, halftone, and try 40 line at a 22.5° angle, and either elliptical or round dots, OUTPUT RESOLUTION at 1200 ppi, it makes your dots much cleaner). Then you can "Place" it into Illustrator and assign the spot color there.

Steve

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