Halftones on colors

[Frog]

How can I see a mock-up of how various percentage black tints will look on a color other than white?
I guess that I want to make them transparent.

[Denis Kolar]

Multiply setting for that particular layer in PS, or Multiply setting in the transparency pane in the Illy.
I do not know for Draw.

[Dottonedan]

What DK said would work for those images that print straight to the shirt. If they overlap othe rcolors, print on top of other parts, blend with others (one or more) at all, then you will have different results. It's hard to show how it will look. Some files, you would need to make many adjustments to show the much of the print results. Other files may not need much work at all. Bottom line, is you need to be very tuned in at knowing what to do to get them to look "accurate". Otherwise, it's a guessing game for the more complicated images.

Illy has a few other features to show how a job will look printed but this is still not 100% accurate and nothing is. Not sure if your Corel does something similar.

[ScreenFoo]

You can mock up actual halftones in draw--the trick is, you have to make the image into a halftoned black and white bitmap, and then change your mode to "duotone".   Pick your two colors, and then take the ink color, and reverse the curve.
It's kind of a PITA.  If you want an example file, shoot me an email, and let me know what version you're running.

It's also possible to make one color transparent, and layer them on top of a shirt mock-up, but as Dan pointed out, and anyone on press will tell you, 'that crap ain't gonna look like that!"   

[Sbrem]

If you want to see actual halftones, you could convert to bitmap mode in PS, and set the line count and angle and shape. I don't use CD, but in Illy, you can place the bitmap and see it the actual halftones. Now you can fill a rectangle with any color and place the bitmap on top, only the dots show, the background is transparent. Maybe you can do that in CD?

Steve

[ScreenFoo]

Heh, perhaps I should have said "in Corel Draw", instead of "in draw", but that was exactly what I was describing.   

[Frog]

I will still be exploring this, but as of ten minutes ago, they are now talking straight black and white (with the white actually being Carolina Blue lol!)

Nonetheless, the new art still contains the rgb equivalent of 3% and 4% tints that I wouldn't even try to hold on the screen let alone print accurately and hope that they were just an oversight!

Believe it or not, yesterday, this was a five or six color job on white. Then grayscale on blue with tints ranging from 10-80%, initially not heeding my warnings of  these grays being drastically different without a white underbase. Crazy kids!

[ZooCity]

Hey Frog, Steve's method is my go to for mocking up halftones.  Put it in PS, up the resolution to 600-900 ppi, Greyscale (discard color info ok), Bitmap and punch in your rip settings you plan to run the screen at when prompted, Output Resolution = to your ppi for the file.  You can apply Curves to the greyscale if need be before bitmapping to open it up a little.  Save the bitmap as a .tiff and place it in Illy.  You can then assign a color to that placed .tiff which will display, place a background layer for the shirt behind it and add in any vector text or art and then copy/paste the whole shebang onto your mockups. Be sure to instruct your client to zoom in a little on the image to see what's going on of course.  Halftones display weird on monitors in my opinion.  I often send a separate .pdf for the halftone preview along with the shirt mocks as the file type seems to preview them correctly when displayed on the monitor at print size.

Anyone without a rip can use the above routine to print halftones, fyi.  I did this for years. 

If you just need to preview on-screen, I set my view in Illy to Overprint Preview, assign the fills you want overprinted correctly in attributes, stack it up as you will print it and adjust transparency.  This isn't 100% and you need to take some visual cues as to what your 50% fill, let's say looks like in real life but is handy. 

If you want, send me the file and I'll try and run it for you if you aren't using PS.  I'm not sure how corel handles this but I do know that the free inkscape applies 'tones in an screen view, or was that gimp?, well one of those does it. 

[mk162]

If you don't care about the halftones, you can always use the transparency feature.  Just set your color to 100% of whatever and change the amount of transparency to the desired effect.  Works well because you can output it from that file still.

[Sbrem]

Hey Frog, Steve's method is my go to for mocking up halftones.  Put it in PS, up the resolution to 600-900 ppi, Greyscale (discard color info ok), Bitmap and punch in your rip settings you plan to run the screen at when prompted, Output Resolution = to your ppi for the file.  You can apply Curves to the greyscale if need be before bitmapping to open it up a little.  Save the bitmap as a .tiff and place it in Illy.  You can then assign a color to that placed .tiff which will display, place a background layer for the shirt behind it and add in any vector text or art and then copy/paste the whole shebang onto your mockups. Be sure to instruct your client to zoom in a little on the image to see what's going on of course.  Halftones display weird on monitors in my opinion.  I often send a separate .pdf for the halftone preview along with the shirt mocks as the file type seems to preview them correctly when displayed on the monitor at print size.

Anyone without a rip can use the above routine to print halftones, fyi.  I did this for years. 

If you just need to preview on-screen, I set my view in Illy to Overprint Preview, assign the fills you want overprinted correctly in attributes, stack it up as you will print it and adjust transparency.  This isn't 100% and you need to take some visual cues as to what your 50% fill, let's say looks like in real life but is handy. 

If you want, send me the file and I'll try and run it for you if you aren't using PS.  I'm not sure how corel handles this but I do know that the free inkscape applies 'tones in an screen view, or was that gimp?, well one of those does it.

Yes, I forgot to mention to set the output resolution way up, I use 1200 during the bitmap conversion, it makes for much cleaner dots...