Browsing Tag: screen printing

In today’s tutorial I’m going to show you how to separate simulated or spot process manually coming up hey welcome back everybody if you’re in the market for Adobe Photoshop or illustrator these are linked down in the description what it will do is help fund our channels that way we can continue to make tutorials such as these and it doesn’t cost you any more than if you’re just to go over to adobe.com yourself okay so I have some artwork that I pulled off the internet I found the largest image that I could use that looks like it would work really well on a black t-shirt so here is our artwork and the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to go to image and duplicate I’m gonna hit okay I’m gonna drag this off to the side the reason being and why I am doing this is I want the original image for a basis of comparison while I am doing these separations to do simulated or spot process okay so here’s our duplicate image when a client provides artwork you want to make sure that to providing it at full print size at 300 dpi no more less than 200 dpi so let’s res this up a little bit we’re gonna go to image and size you can hit command option I as your quick key I know my maximum print size is 12 by 15 so I just in height right here just put 15 I’m going to hit OK and what it’s doing is is just raising it up a little bit hit command 0 to get it back to a general overview the same thing for this image over here command 0 now the next thing I’m going to do and hit D on the keyboard make sure my foreground color is black actually you know what it’s my background colors that I need black so I’m going to hit X on the keyboard I’m going to go to image canvas size up by an inch on both dimensions that way we can feather the edge out I don’t want the edge of this to be if I were to print this on a t-shirt I don’t want a hard edge on both sides so now at this point what I’m going to do is I’m just going to take a brush quickly hold option and ctrl down and all I had to do is drag your mouse a little bit what it will do is kind of resize your brush hit command – and I’m just going to go in here make sure my foreground color is black and I’m just going to feather some of these edges out here and all I’m doing is clicking from one point to the other and holding shift that will do pretty much a continuous brush stroke instead of having to go in and manually draw it I’m going to try not to affect this too much but for demonstration sake it’s not that big of a deal okay so that looks pretty good I might feather this just a touch more so it doesn’t quite look like a rectangle now that we’re at this point the first thing I’m going to do is I’m gonna hover my mouse over RGB hold down command for you PC users out there just hold ctrl click on RGB I’m going to go over to select modify expand and we’re gonna expand it by 1 and you’ll find this is going to be the common theme throughout this entire tutorial at this point we’re going to go over here to our create a new mask we’re gonna hit that hit command D go over to our layer and hit command I and what that will do is inverse it so now at this point what is black is what will actually print down that will be your white so what we just created is our white base so I’m going to call this white base hit enter I’m going to go back over to RGB next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to go to color range and I’m going to go to Red’s and I’m going to hit okay back over to select modify expand by one and then I’m going to create a new mask layer let’s call this red and then hit deselect command I to inverse that and we’re gonna repeat this down for every single color that you are about to see here so select color range we’re gonna go to yellows we’re gonna hit okay and at this point because there’s very little yellow it will give me a little bit of a warning I’m gonna hit okay so we’re gonna go over to select modify expand by one will give me that same warning again however I’m going to go over make a new mask I’m going to hit D to deselect command deep hit command I to inverse it you can actually see that there is some information here and I’ll show you a little bit of an easier way to figure out whether or not even need to make a channel in this case we are making a channel but this will end up being the amount of screens that you will end up screen printing down so let’s go back over the RGB select color range we’re gonna go over the greens and you can see here I have white mask selected it doesn’t really look like there’s a whole lot of green in here the reason I did do the yellows because that yellow will be in her face and that’s what’s going to make those flesh tones so I’m just gonna hit cancel on that one I’m gonna go over to select color range let’s go back over to cyan ‘s hit OK you can definitely see there’s information there select modify expand by one make a new alpha channel hit deselect I’ll call this cyan hit command-i while still on that channel go back up the RGB we’re gonna keep going forward select color range blues you can see there is some blue information here but what I think I will end up doing because I do only have a six color press is I probably will end up just merging that blue with the cyan so let’s just go ahead and hit OK you see us give me a little bit of warning in it okay select modify expand by one okay hit OK again new mask we’re gonna hit command D go over here invert it we’re going to name it blue back to RGB select color range last but not least four colors magenta and you can see there is a little bit of magenta we might end up merging this into the red so that way we can stick to our six colors because we only have a six color press if you have a press with 812 colors keep that in mind that you want to limit it to the amount of colors you’re able to print so I’m going to go to select modify expand by one and we’re going to make a new mask command D over to our channel we’re going to call this magenta a command I to inverse it so now you see what we’re actually printing now what we’re going to do is we’re going to create a highlight color and how you want to go about doing that as selecting your blue channel you’re going to right click on that hit duplicate Channel we’re gonna call this white highlight and it’s very important that you do select invert otherwise you’ll have all kinds of issues you’ll kind of be wondering what’s going on so I’m gonna hit okay so now if I go down to that you’ll see my selection for the white highlight and we’re gonna adjust all these and I’ll show you that here in a moment so our next step at this point is we’re going to just make a new channel by clicking this new button here it’s completely black I’m going to drag that up to the top just above white base let’s call this black t-shirt I’m gonna hit enter I’m gonna double click on that I’m going to make sure that it is indeed black and it is reading 100% opacity so that’s great next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to double click on white base we’re going to now designate this as a spot color and we are gonna make sure that it is white and we’re gonna make the solidity 85% use 85% for your whites just kind of as a default you can always go back and adjust a little bit to get the results that you do want so I’m gonna go ahead and hit OK now I’m gonna go over the red double click on it you already have a red color selected here so I’m gonna select spot color now for the rest these colors I’m gonna make them 5% and this channel here I forgot to label it but I do know it is yellow because there’s hardly any information here and it’s making up those flesh tones so I’m going to double click on this make it a spot color and then I’m gonna go over to my CMYK percentages here I’m gonna make that a true yellow hit okay make this 5% okay I’m just going to go down line so when it’s a percent cyan okay five percent solidity we’re going to go over to blue make it a spot color since I am 50% magenta zero for the rest of the values okay we’re gonna make that five percent again hit okay and then we got our magenta make that 100% yellow zero okay spot color Lidda t 5% and then last but not least we have our white highlight make that white spot color once again 85 percent I’m going to hit okay so now at this point we turn all of our colors on and you’ll see that we’re getting closer to actually having all of our separations done one of the things you want to do is just go ahead and turn the white highlight off and then we’re gonna start working with the white base I’m gonna click on it hit command l to bring our levels up now you don’t want to compress it too too much on this in you kind of want to work with your your middle fader here to kind of work with some of these values here but in this case because there are some pretty dark spots over here we may need to compress it just a little more just keep that in mind so we’re just trying to make this look similar to this over here and what you’re going to have to do is just mess around with your your level sliders and this is you’re essentially 100% this is your 0% this is your in-betweens your 50s 2575 all that fun stuff so I’m going to pull this back and we’re gonna gradually just tweak it each one of these until it gets closer to the results that we’re looking for and keep in mind we do have our white highlight down here that will help boost some of these colors here for example this skull here whatever this is down here it should be white our white highlight will definitely affect that and make it a bright white so that looks pretty good for the moment let’s go over to our red hit command l bring our levels up we might want to boost that just a little bit even might want to change the color of this red something a little warmer and just keep in mind that whatever color you do end up going with that is what you should use in your screen and you know it’s not too too bad I think I’ll just leave it as is one of the things I’m going to concentrate on is her face right here so I’m going to mess with this middle slider just a little bit I think that’s fine let’s move on to our yellow and now you can tell if you go really extreme just how much this affects this artwork let me slide this around a little bit until we get the shade in her face that we’re looking for so I’m gonna hit okay we’re gonna go over to cyan command L and continue down the line until starts to look more like our example over here now because we are doing these separations it’s not going to be 100% spot on you can get pretty close but some of the things you have to do you have to do a lot of tweaking for example with these Reds you may have to do a separate selection for those and go in and tweak that manually in a case like this may even need to make a black layer which we may end up doing okay so there’s not a whole lot of blue here one of the things I’m going to do is hold down command hover over the blue channel here click on it I’m going to hit OK I’m going to go over to cyan make sure my foreground fill color is black I’m gonna hit option + delete so that essentially combined the cyan and the blue at this point I’m gonna get rid of the blue because there’s not a whole lot there what information was there is now in the cyan layer next thing we’re going to do is go over to magenta there’s not a whole lot on the magenta side so I think I’m gonna do that same thing I’m gonna hold command down and then I’m going to go over to red make sure my foreground color here is black hit option delete so now that essentially merged those two colors and then hit command D go over here to magenta I’m going to deselect that or delete it excuse me so we’re starting to get a little close at this point what I would do is I’m going to go ahead and turn on my highlight white color and that will give us a little more information here so I’m gonna go down to my highlight white gopher to image adjustments brightness and contrast and as we start to slide this you will see that we’re starting to get some results towards where it’s starting to look closer towards the poster you can even boost up some of the contrast here that’s looking pretty good I’m gonna hit okay go back over to my highlight white and go to my levels and I may pull some of this back and what we’re trying to avoid is some of the hard breaks interface here the more you compress it the harder breaks her that you will have you can see these breaks going on now we want a gradual transition with those tones so I think I’ll pull this back a little more get a little closer to where Annie’s a beam I don’t think that’s looking pretty good I’m gonna go over them back over to my white base now you can see here that we are using five colors to achieve what we have going on this farm so if you are happy with the the way it is at this point you could just use five screens and you would get these results here but I’m going to tweak it some more and hit command Elm on our white base and I’m going to pull back some of these colors here and what appears to be smoke might be some sort of concrete background or something like that and I’m going to compress it just a little more it looking a little bit more like our original example here and I think we’re starting to get a little closer you know I’m gonna hit cancel I’m gonna go over to image adjustments brightness contrast and see what that gets us because some of these shoulder pad parts here it’s not quite there just yet and it’s okay using some of these extremes to really kind of figure out where things are at the the goal is to get as close to this image as we can it’s starting to get there you know I might just hit cancel on that let me try the let’s go over to our G beam let’s go to select color range we’re gonna use sample colors we’re gonna come up here and select our black and we’re gonna mess with our fuzziness just a little bit and some of the things I’m paying attention to are the shoulder pads here the body of the suit and I’m going to hit okay now I’m going to make a new channel let me back up a step let me hit undo select modify expand by one new channel I’m going to deselect that come over here and hit command I the inverse it double click on it let’s name it black you got a spot color make it black we’ll make the slit in e5 now let’s see what we have here one of the things I’m going to do is I’m going to drag to black just above the red generally one of the the printing orders that I like to do white black red yellow cyan if you do incorporate a grey you generally want to do that right before the white highlight so let me go to my black hit command L and we’re just gonna mess around that a little bit until we start to get some of the results that we’re looking for him alright let’s try that one here okay I’m gonna hit command undo see changes that we have made turn it on and off see if we’re any closer to where we need to be at I feel like it’s starting to get there black might be a little overwhelming let’s go back over to our white base actually let’s go over to cyan let’s see if we can’t pull that back a little bit and what I’m looking at is some of these areas here I feel like it’s just a little too bright in this particular separation so we’re just kind of tweaking that at the moment is going to tweak that just a bit maybe you can compress it just a touch more let’s turn off our highlight color I still looking pretty good and we’re starting to get there this definitely is a process one of the things I’m not too happy about is red let’s go to the channel of the red see if we boost it a little bit without affecting her face too too much you know might even be the color so you just kind of have to play around these things a little bit you you and so I’m trying to boost this red here so I think one of the things I’m going to do is go back to RGB here and I am going to go to select color range and I am going to select this red to find the point that looks like it’s the most read that’s when my fuzziness a little bit here in the hit okay go back over to my red channel option D let’s hit X on that option D again command d n– command 0 get the overview and let’s take a look at our results looks a little more red let’s kind of back up a step I’m gonna mess around with that just a little bit more looks like in our white base we may just need a little more white behind that red just to really make it stand out so let’s go back over to our RGB m– select color range come back over to this red selected floor fuzziness down just a little bit hit okay I’m gonna go over to my white base I’m a go to select modify and I’m going to feather it by one a little bit of a smoother transition D on the keyboard eggs I’m gonna hit option delete should give us a little bit brighter of a red let’s see how that turned out there we go now we’re talking that’s looking pretty good let me change the color of this red mess with it just a little bit see if we can get a little closer to our image over on the left okay so I’m gonna hit okay there are some hard breaks here so I think I may just go back one more step go back to my RGB select color range come back to my red maybe increase the fuzziness just a little more let’s try 100 and the select modify feather let’s do by 2 this time and let’s hit undo just like modify feather let’s feather by let’s try five let’s see how that works out and accidentally hit the crop adjustment by hitting C on the keyboard not a big deal okay we’re over on our white bass hit option delete make sure black is in the foreground color let’s see what that gets us actually I mean back that up I think I put that on the white base oh let’s put that on red there we go that’s looking better just looking more like a bright red here and because this is a low-res image we are getting some pretty hard breaks going on there but for screen printing purposes I think this will look pretty fantastic might go back and change this red just a little bit but you know you can always go back in your your screen and put whatever red you want in there I’m just might highlight white just a little more now let’s cancel that go back to our read at levels I feel like we lost smoothie flesh tones in her face there okay so I think that is looking pretty good might tweak our black just a little bit and so you can see what I’m doing is I’m going back and I’m just kind of going to each channel messing around with it for demonstrations sake I think this looks really good there is more work that I could do to it to get it closer to this picture but I’m pretty happy with it for now if I were to print that it would look fantastic so what we’re going to do at this point is we’re going to go to a white base and we’re just going to label this number one we’re going to go to black number two I’m going to go down the line and this will be the print sequence and what you need to set your screens up you probably could have done that in the beginning okay now that we have all that set what I’m going to do is I’m going to select these channels here and I am going to delete those and before you do that you could go back and save it for demonstration sake I will just go ahead and save that and we’ll just save it as a Photoshop file include our alpha and spot channel spot color excuse me I’ll just go ahead and save that real quick now at this point and as we were doing we’re going to go ahead and take these and we’re going to just delete these channels you can also just take those and select it and then go to your garbage can delete those channels and then I’m going to hit command shift s and what we’re going to do is we’re going to save this as a Photoshop dcs 2.0 file make sure your spot color selection here is selected and what that is going to do is gonna save each one of those channels as a spot color and it will bring it into adobe illustrator so let’s go ahead and save that it will save it as an EPS like I hopefully I just mentioned that but preview TIFF that’ll be fine you do want to save it as a single file DCS no composite you can use ASCII 285 or just ask you to go ahead okay now I’m gonna take my registration template which you guys can get from our website we’ll leave a link down in the description you can go over and purge that for five bucks so let me go to my templates here I’m going to open up my registration template that’s going to create a new file in this case we’re going to go over to our art layer and I will drag this below the center and registration marks just to make sure those are on top I’m going to find my file let’s go to our desktop and here is our EPS file you can see it does have quite a bit of data here it’s 122 megabytes we’re going to go ahead and place that down as you see as it imports it it is importing each one of these spot colors and it will place it into our swatch palette here so it is placing it down on the artboard pretty large file now it may look a little sloppy here but how it comes out on film and when you go to press it will just it will look just like we had it in Photoshop so I’m going to centreline this to the artboard we have to give it a second because it’s large file don’t have the fastest computer in the world okay so at this point I’m going to make sure my registration marks I’m going to lock the dart layer make sure my registration marks are out of the artwork just using shift the arrow key it’s going to kind of Center this up and the registration and center marks are designated as a registration color that way your registration marks will print out on every single piece of film so as you can see here we do have our spot colors we got our white base our black are red are yellow are cyan and then our highlight wipe in this case if I were printing down black I would feather out this border here or the you know the hard edge that way when you do go to print it on a t-shirt you’re not going to see that so essentially you would kind of feather it along with this edge here now how I would go about printing this film at this point is I’ll hit command P for print we have accurate and a Epson 1430 a key rip is set to you I would suggest using 42 to 45 dpi at 22.5 degree angle and what you can do is you can click output here and you will see that you have your six spot colors that will print out and that will print every single one of your separations so at this point all I have to do is hit print expose some screen setup on press you will use 2:30 mesh screens print your under base give it a couple hits flash that and then go back and print every single one of your colors wet-on-wet what that will do is allow those colors to mix up and give you the results that you are seeing in Photoshop now you will have to do about four to six just kind of test prints before the ink really does build up on the back of those screens and you will start to see the results that you’re after thanks for tuning in guys I really do appreciate it for those of you that did stick around for the entire tutorial I really appreciate it we’ve had some requests to do more of these tutorials so don’t forget guys if you’re in the market for Doby Photoshop or illustrator these are linked down a description it’ll help support channels that way we can continue to do tutorials like these for you as always don’t forget to subscribe hit the little icon down over here we have some more videos for you over this away and go over to our Facebook page to give it a like give this video like subscribe share all that great social media stuff and until next time guys we’ll see you later you