New To Photoshop

[bpfohler]

We been using Corel for as long as I can remember but I've bee  trying to teach myself Photoshop.  I've watched some tutorials and have been playing around with separations of some customer files I've converted to bitmaps.
  IN this  separation I pulled the black (select,color range), the image doesn't show it but I had nice clean lines in my viking ship.  Unfortunately when I dialed back the fuzziness to get rid of the remnants of the wave outline below the ship (which is dark blue)  I  lost clean edges in the ship.   How do I clean up these lines in my black channel or do I have to make changes to my RGB layer before I start separations? 

[Dottonedan]

First, when you open a vector file into Photoshop make sure that you bring it in at the final print size first.
2nd, make sure that you start at a very high rez. For clean hard lines, I now work at 600ppi but 300 is common.


It looks like your raster file was semi low to begin with and adjsuting levels or curves to burn out extra stuff also eats away at your edges.
If you wanted, you could re-draw this with the path tool for exceptionally clean lines like vector.

Also, Turn off ANTI ALIASING.

[Nation03]

I don't work with bitmaps in photoshop unless I'm creating halftones manually.

I stick to RGB and I do my seps in layers not channels. Might not be the best practice, but it's worked for me for most spot color and simple halftone stuff. Anything really complicated is going to get subbed out and that doesn't happen all too often. Try opening the file in RGB at 300 to 600 DPI.

[Colin]

If you want vector sharp lines - Bring into photoshop at 600 dpi.  At final size.

Make sure your black is 100% RGB black.  Otherwise you will get more halftones than you want.  Try to never start work in CMYK, unless you are using cmyk color spaces as spot colors.  Or you have a lot more experience under your belt to be able to pull stuff apart.

Make sure your other colors have very little to no "color spectrum overlap".  I.e. if you are pulling a green, photoshop will also pull from the yellow and blue spectrum (yellow and blue make green .  So, if I had a blue and a green in my design, I would try to change the green to a yellow for easier separating.  Pulling yellow, photoshop will not try and grab blue.

Hope that made sense.

[bpfohler]

Sorry with a late response but it's been crazy.
  How do I bring my file into PS at 600dpi and final size when it's customer supplied graphics?   My reason for jumping into PS is to do seps from files supplied by customers without having to vectorize like in Corel.
 

[Dottonedan]

Sorry with a late response but it's been crazy.
  How do I bring my file into PS at 600dpi and final size when it's customer supplied graphics?   My reason for jumping into PS is to do seps from files supplied by customers without having to vectorize like in Corel.
 

Well, there are ways suggested that we work (when creating our own work),  and when receiving art files from the outside.

When you get them from the outside, you are at the mercy of the provider unless you turn the art away and ask for what you need.

Here is a good tip about receiving art files.  Most times, people can get you a PDF of the file. A PDF will let you pen the vector in Photoshop (at any resolution you want to change to). What originally went into that PDF and re-saved as a PDF can be random and you may end up opening a turd anyways.  But in general, if it were vector to begin with from anyplace, and they re-save as a pdf,  you can open that at any resolution you want.

When you open the pdf file into Photoshop it will have the last rez in the setup from your previous job or will default to 72. so, BEFORE you hit enter in that document window,  change the dimensions to to INCHES and change the rez to either 600 or 300.  If the dimentions are small, you will want an even higher rez like 1200, and then double the size....but uncheck resample image