Friday, 27 April 2018

Digital Preparation of Positives for Screen Printing Session 1

Techniques apply to silk screen printing but also apply to print. 

Photoshop skills required: 

- Using layers 
- Colour modes
- Adjustment / layers
- Simple selections 

- Allows you to visualise onscreen how the screen print will appear and print two positives. 

- The first thing you must do always is desaturate the image so the image still supports colour. 

- The adjustment layers used include threshold. This simplifies the image to produce pixels only in black or white.

- Levels adjust the image to appear nearly like a stencil. Hue and saturation adjustment allows you to simulate the ink that can be used for screen printing. 

- Using a clipping mask can apply this to one layer or a border between layers by pressing 'alt' and clicking 

- Consider the transparency of printed ink layers that overlay you must use the multiply layer mode (Transparency ink)

- Overprinting : how inks work together in the printing process 

- Consider the production process whilst working digitally - transparency and interaction of inks 

Half Tones 

- How to reproduce tints of an ink during the print process. 

- When the positive is printed a half tone screen is applied

- This creates the illusion of tones through smaller and greater spacing 

- Must consider frequency (spacing of the dots) 

- Frequency no larger than 50 

- Angle of 15 degrees 

- This avoids creating interference patterns (moire patterns)



- Save background image as a TIFF in grayscale mode 

- A3 appropriate laser printing positive 

- Use Illustrator press file and place 

- Image is a composite - we see everything that will print 

- Doesn't change image half tones added during the print process 

- Bitmap permanently changes the image 

- Bitmap image must first be in greyscale mode

- To maintain detail increase resolution from 300dpi to 1200

- Select option Half tone screen 

- Using the bitmap technique print in digital print don't use laser printer, as this will create a moire pattern 

Using alternative techniques to create the same outcome

CMYK & RGB Mode 

CMYK
- CMYK for print
- Ink on paper
- Subtractive 
- Produces colour during the print process

RGB
- for screen 
- Light of monitor 
- Additive 




Using CMYK 

- Using Channels is how photoshop stores information about the image 

- Mainly selection and colour information

- Shade of grey is linked to the shade of cyan 

- When displaying two channels at once to see colours contained 

- Select file print in Illustrator in Output, Mode select Separations

- Is possible to print in CMYK 

- Each angle needs to be different for each ink 

- Angles : 15, 75, 105,155

- Frequency : max 15 lpi 

- Splitting Channels applies a grayscale to each channel 

- This allows you to apply Bitmap and Halftone in that way 

- CMYK the channel becomes the positive 


Colours used in commercial print 

- CMYK : four process inks are over printed in order to print a colour 

- Spot : one spot ink is used to print a colour (Pantone colours)

- Spot colour used for the accurate representation of colour particularly used in branding

- Using fewer inks or (spot colour) makes production cheaper

- Spot inks are most relevant to the screen printing process 

- 14 base inks & transparent white in Pantone colour selection 

- Each pantone swatch indicates base colour mixture 


Channels in Photoshop

- Select new spot channel from channel option bar 

- Select Pantone solid uncoated 

- Type in the number of the colour swatch 

- Cannot work with colour within a channel

- Can alter the opacity by altering the solidity, opaque: 100%

 



Using knock out technique 


 Select and copy and paste image layer into channel 
Save image as TIFF file 

Getting positives from this image
Open Illustrator 



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