Re: Re: Digital Negative Etiology

I am trying to get spot colors and have not worked it out yet. Fastfilms is great for t-shirts but thats not what I want to do. Thanks for your review. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

George
>
> From: Katharine Thayer <kthayer@pacifier.com>
> Date: 2005/02/28 Mon PM 05:56:53 GMT
> To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
> Subject: 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 Tue Mar 1 10:08:33 2005