10 Color Photoshop Channel Separation

[Different]

Hey guys!

Here is a sep I did last week that I want to share.  I put it in a sequence as one color is added at a time so you can see how it comes together in Photoshop channels.  The final shot is the print on a shirt.

http://mitchdifferent.blogspot.com/

Best Regards,
Different

[Donnie]

Very Nice. Thanks Mitch!

[ZooCity]

Tight. 

It's crazy how difficult it can be to view channel seps properly in CS programs, I wish that wasn't so and they had a "pre-press" suite or something. 

[Fluid]

Saw this on the group page in FB.  Nice job Mitch   

Q?  how will you be doing your classes in 2012? 

[Different]

Thanks Guys!

Richard,  A local screen supplier in Houston(Lee's Screen Supply) has offered me a space and contacts for workshops.  Bill Hood has a school in Austin and he has also offered me space as well as a plug on his site.  I will do these on nonconflicting times on Saturdays.   All these guys are great people!

[Dottonedan]

Tight. 

It's crazy how difficult it can be to view channel seps properly in CS programs, I wish that wasn't so and they had a "pre-press" suite or something.

I don't know how everyone else does it, but I use Adobe CS5 and channels seps in Photoshop.  When I get a sep file to match the original att side by side, that is how I get great results on press. When it matches what I see, I know it's a winner. Other times, I have to do some things that I know I can't see in the file, like dropping a percent of process blue straight on to a black shirt. I have an idea, but won't know the exact results till it hits the press. Much of that is just experience.

[Dottonedan]

Great as usual Mitch,  you do awesome work.

[ZooCity]

Tight. 

It's crazy how difficult it can be to view channel seps properly in CS programs, I wish that wasn't so and they had a "pre-press" suite or something.

I don't know how everyone else does it, but I use Adobe CS5 and channels seps in Photoshop.  When I get a sep file to match the original att side by side, that is how I get great results on press. When it matches what I see, I know it's a winner. Other times, I have to do some things that I know I can't see in the file, like dropping a percent of process blue straight on to a black shirt. I have an idea, but won't know the exact results till it hits the press. Much of that is just experience.

Dan, do you use the spot color assigned channels to comp to the original on screen?  This gets me really close to knowing what it's going to do on press but rarely matches the original on screen.  To get that, I need to merge all the spot channels to an rgb composite and then, of course, you're viewing an rgb composite based on your spot channel seps.   It is nice to use channels to mess with print order and I use the living hell out of the "solidity" adjustment when doing this.

This is the only big advantage I see to having a program like Sep Studio, it seems to handle previewing very well from the videos I've watched but hard to say how color accurate those previews are.  I think if someone had a rip with a feature set that crept further into the realm of separation it'd be a big winner.  You could do a channel preview mode as bitmap versions of what the rip is actually going to print on each color's film.  Huge help there alone but you could take it further and have an option to simulate gain as well as ink volume based on open area of your mesh on the bitmapped preview seps to get a handle on how the blending is going to work out ahead of time.  Just rambling off on this but it seems so feasible as most of the tools you need to build something like this are already there in CS, just need to get a rip that talks to it a little more directly for final proofing.  Maybe some higher end ones have this and I'm just ignorant to it.

As an aside, I do like how well PS handles swatch colors, very accurate to my eye unlike in Illy but that's my fault as I know adobe has a way to manage this across all CS apps.  Project for early next year is color calibration on all our monitors. 

[Different]

Dan is on it!  I also do a side by side comparison and get great results.  You do need an understanding of screen printing and opacities of color, the strength of a pigment and how it will overtake a design when mixing,  how much white is mixed with that particular color.  Oh, hell!!  I'm not even scratching the surface. . .  As Dan says it comes down to experience and knowledge.  If you have that, your odds of having a successful print will be better.  Me? Maybe 95% of the time I have success.  Sometimes there is a problem and the solution is on the press. Other times it is the seps. But rarely,  and a very small fix.  You just gotta be fast at determining the problem, fixing it and getting it back on the press. Yes, I make mistakes.

Regardless, no software separation program out there can equal what goes on in the right side of your brain, or equal the keen vision that you need to do this kind of work, or exponentially make decisions on the fly!  You can listen to books on tape and let someone else read the story while you press pause, rewind or play. You don't even need to know how to read. . .   Same with the separation software.

If you have Photoshop and Illustrator, then you have all that you need to do separations for T-shirts.

[Different]

Thanks Dan for the complement!  You never cease to amaze me with your work and technical knowledge.  We have talked on the phone and never met face to face,  but I bump into you all the time wherever I go on the internet!

[myseps]

Hey Mitch,
Nice to see you here!  Great job on the separation.  I really like how you lay out the sep photos on your blog.

[Fluid]

Thanks again for checking that Mitch.

[Different]

Thank you Scott!  Both you and Richard rock on seps!  I like to see your guys work and I am always studying to see what direction another artist applies their techniques to get the job done.  I will even break out with the 30X magnifier to study blends and the print order on a printed tee!

You guys keep up the good fight!

[hazeremover]

Dan is on it!  I also do a side by side comparison and get great results.  You do need an understanding of screen printing and opacities of color, the strength of a pigment and how it will overtake a design when mixing,  how much white is mixed with that particular color.  Oh, hell!!  I'm not even scratching the surface. . .  As Dan says it comes down to experience and knowledge.  If you have that, your odds of having a successful print will be better.  Me? Maybe 95% of the time I have success.  Sometimes there is a problem and the solution is on the press. Other times it is the seps. But rarely,  and a very small fix.  You just gotta be fast at determining the problem, fixing it and getting it back on the press. Yes, I make mistakes.

Regardless, no software separation program out there can equal what goes on in the right side of your brain, or equal the keen vision that you need to do this kind of work, or exponentially make decisions on the fly!  You can listen to books on tape and let someone else read the story while you press pause, rewind or play. You don't even need to know how to read. . .   Same with the separation software.

If you have Photoshop and Illustrator, then you have all that you need to do separations for T-shirts.

Well said.

Some terrific screen printing you have there Mitch.

That would be something if you could get a closer "real time" preview/proof to look at on the screen. Alas, the paper (offset, web, etc.) prepress guys have it so easy. The Adobe software exists for their native process. Spot on proofs are generated on the substrate the art is destined for. Unless we're screen printing flat stock, textiles throw a bunch of variables into the mix.

I'm curious, do you guys ever color sep to a color, hi-res printout/proof or is it always just sep to the artwork on the screen? Or, that's ridiculous! A color proof printout always travels with the job as a guide for the printer.

[Dottonedan]

A Hazeremover,

I'm curious, do you guys ever color sep to a color, hi-res printout/proof or is it always just sep to the artwork on the screen? Or, that's ridiculous! A color proof printout always travels with the job as a guide for the printer.

I have seen shops rely on both. As a separation "business", I rely on a flat jpg image of the art for reference as well as actual art file on screen.

When I worked with a company that went by the color print out, they had a valid point. The customer looks at a color print when they review art. Thats what they are approving, what they are seeing right in front of them. After a few times for getting burnt (mostly due to fear by the customer getting in trouble by their superiors), that fear gets passed down to the print vendors. I'm sure somewhere down the line, some printer got burnt for not matching an approved version and the paper proof was used as a tool for justification.  A way to improve image accuracy was to index everything from the seps down to the color print. So what you saw on screen was pretty close to what you saw on the color print. They would index the art, save a jpg of that and print a color print. All colors were locked into the cel so to speak and over all, the image was consistent. It was a pretty accurate method (provided that you wanted to convert your sep methods to all indexing.

I currently work with a company that also heavily relies on the jpg image. We just had a conversation about this and the pit falls of using the color print as THE only method yesterday. The downfall is, the artist at this shop are not really full fledged screen print artist and they just create pretty pictures on tee shirts. They create everything in RGB layers using all of the latest fancy filters, modes and effects. This gives the art more POP and looks lovely and vibrant. a few issues with doign that are:

1, our inks are never as bright as what the artist did on screen. So when they have all of this "GLOW and GLEAM. it never comes out like that on press. Much more dull.

2, They start out with a request to use a black tee. Then, after the art review, the customer says, lets put it on additional colors. So, (in RGB), with these special gleams, glints, modes and affects, (they react to the background they are put on). Multiply, Screen, color burn, etc. all change based on what color you put underneath them. Well, using the same idea mentioned above, the sales rep says, "hey, my customer approved it on a black like this...and it looks different on a red tee and they approved it on the red tee as well.  So, we need to make each tee different on press". This is not the way to present concepts to a buyer.
They want you to make it look like they approved and as a result, have different screens/seps for each different color shirt (when you present it differently) on different garments.

For the company I am working with right now, this is something that will get fixed I'm sure, as it is not efficient in the least.

D