Re: Digital Negative Etiology

res1dvao@verizon.net wrote:
>
> I know you can do three and four color seperations with Photoshop but the program I refered to did up to 9 color seperations. How do some printers end up with 20-30 screens for their prints?

George, the way I read the manual, Fastfilm is designed to run within
Photoshop, so seems like you'd have to have both anyway if you were
going to get the Fastfilms program.

The reason why some printers might end up with many screens for a print
is that screenprinting historically has been done with spot colors
rather than with the kind of separations used for commercial printing or
for gum printing, where three or four colors, printed over each other,
make all the colors. With spot colors, if you want purple somewhere in
an image, you need a purple screen and purple ink, and if you want
orange, you need a screen for that, and orange ink, in other words you
need a screen and ink for every different color that is in your
image.It's not the same thing, but it makes me think of Helen
Frankenthaler and her 102-color woodcuts.

The FastFilm program does include CMYK separations, but cautions that
CMYK doesn't always look good on a knit T-shirt, even a white one,
because the colors can all sort of run together. So they emphasize more
the "simulated process colors" and "indexed colors" which are spot
color separations. It looks on the face of it like someone has gone to
some trouble to work out the best way to get a color image down to the
least number of spot colors that will still look like the original image
and will print well on T-shirts. Most of their demonstration images are
made using four to eight spot colors. The black and white images are
made with black and three shades of grey, printed as spot colors.

If you are going into business making T-shirts and have reason to expect
that you will be able to sell high volumes of the T-shirts, then perhaps
the Fastfilms would make sense. But if your need for separations is more
for images and less for T-shirts, then it seems to me you can do better
for yourself by using Photoshop. If all you want is RGB or CMYK
separations, Photoshop will do it just fine; the only advantage to the
Fastfilms would be the algorithms that reduce a color image to a small
number of spot colors. My 2cents,
Katharine Thayer
Received on Mon Feb 28 19:52:43 2005