Hello, I'm going to show you guys how to separate colors for process printing.
Jimmy O has been gracious enough to let me use one of his designs which he sent
me and he titled Hardcore Rocks. Thanks Jimmy O. I'm going to open the file here.
As you can see there's a lot going on. There's a lot of fine detail in here. We've
got a lot of brushstrokes. We have some some different overlays in here and
everything's kind of, you know, a little crazy. A little bit scattered so we've
got a lot going on. And that's a good thing. You'll notice that this file is in
RGB mode right now which is kind of bad because we're going to lose some of the
color data. We need our image to be in CMYK mode. When we do this you'll notice
that the colors wash out in the greens and blues. That's because the color
gamut for CMYK is very limited. RGB has much brighter greens and blue
blues. Man, that's really hard to say. Alright, so you see here that in my
channels I have now four cyan, magenta, yellow, black. And if you have a file it's
best to have a white background. You can have a colored background, but when we
do these color separations you'll see if you have a colored background you're
just gonna end up with a block around your design. So what we're doing right
here is is gonna be for printing on lighter colored garments. And you want to
make sure for the separations that your image is flat. Now my image is already
flattened because Jimmy O sent me a nice flattened image, but if your image is
not flattened you want to click that, flatten image, and then that way you just
have your background here. Alright, so I'm gonna full screen that. And doing the
separations is actually really easy. Photoshop includes your channels here. The
way that these are laid out in these channels is exactly how it's gonna be
printed. So you have your cyan, magenta, yellow, black. If we take away the black
you'll see that that black area of the design is gone. Your yellow, your magenta,
and your cyan is left here. You notice that after you take off the rest of the
colors and just leave one, the image in your window here on your canvas is is
gonna be grayscale. That's so that when you do print them they they come out as
film positives. So in Photoshop they give you that nice little feature so that
it's you know all set up for you already. But what we want to do is separate
these out and make them print ready, half tone them, and then combine them back
into one file. So what I'm gonna do here is click on the channels tab and then
I'm going to go to split channels. This will automatically split your cyan,
magenta, yellow, black channels into separate files. You can't undo this so
if you if you do that and you didn't want to too bad you're gonna have to close
your file and reopen try again. So you see here this is my black channel. This
is yellow. That design was predominantly yellow in hue. We have magenta here and
cyan here. So what we're gonna do is start with black. We're going to go to
image mode and make this a bitmap. Basically your output you want to be
the same as your screen mesh or pretty close. I make mine a little bit less. I
use 305 mesh screens generally when I print process and we're gonna make this
300 just give it a little bit of leeway there so that it's not too precise. That
way if the mesh is a little bit off it's not a big deal. We're gonna make a half
ton screen and we click okay. This part is where it's kind of tricky. This is
already set up for me but what you want to do is go to your calculator and you
want to take your screen mesh. Mine's gonna be 305 and divide that by 4 and
that's gonna be what your frequency max will be for your screen. So I want to
make that a little bit less. So 70 is already in there. That's what I think is
a good amount of lines per inch for a 305 mesh screen. The angle, you
want to start with 45 degrees. That's just how the separation should be
made. When I show you how the colors lay on top of each other I'll explain
this a little bit more but we're gonna go ahead and click ellipse. This is the
shape that we want to achieve and we're gonna hit okay. Now if we zoom in here on
this black you see that we have a bit math now of that image but when you zoom
out it looks nice and smooth. So this is gonna be my main file. I'm gonna go to
image, mode, grayscale. It's gonna take it back to our regular images here and
then I'm gonna go over here to the eraser tool. I want to get the magic
eraser and make the tolerance about 10. That way I don't erase too much. If we
zoom in here I don't want it to be contiguous. I want it to take it all
the way so I'm gonna click on the white and erase that. You notice here that some
of the dots from the bitmap aren't full. They're like kind of half half shade so
we're gonna duplicate this layer here. Start it up and then I'm gonna merge
these two layers. You can actually just click apple or control E and that'll do
it for you. But now you see I have a nice dark black pattern. Alright and then I
want to make this again. I want to change the image mode again to RGB and I
know we took the image out of CMYK but when we put it back together it's gonna
look better just for our file. Okay so now that I have the black I started with
black so I'm gonna leave this file open and kind of put to the side and now I'm
gonna do the same exact thing with these. We want that to be 300 pixels for my
screen. The only thing we're gonna change here is the angle. We want to add 30
degrees to the angle and what this will do is this will put the ink when it's
printed into a separate quadrant. When when you're printing process if you
imagine a square with like a four square like cut in half twice so you have four
separate squares, squared, two squared. Each each this angle adding 30 degrees
will will move the ink from one quadrant to the other and once again I'll show
you that later when it happens. Alright so the cyan we have bit mapped. See cyan
here I'm gonna go to image mode gray scale. I'm gonna erase that background
again. I'm gonna duplicate this and merge it again and then I'm gonna take
this and move it over and we're just gonna I'm just gonna get in here and
and look at one of these spots for reference and we'll line these up. So
there's a fish here. I'm gonna line this up and if you have a newer version of
Photoshop it usually snaps into place and this is where it snapped into place.
So I'm gonna assume that this is the correct spot. And now this I want to make
cyan. So I'm gonna go into my color libraries here. If you right-click it,
right-click your layer that your science on, go to blending options, color overlay
and then click on the color. And then if you go to color libraries it'll pull up
your Pantone chart. There is a page in the Pantone book that has your process
colors on it. So I'm gonna use process sign in here. I'm gonna click okay close
out of that and then we're gonna back out. And this doesn't quite look right and
we'll fix this later. I'll show you guys how we're gonna fix this. I've already
done the science separations. I can close this window. I don't need to save that.
I'm gonna do the same for the magenta and then once again we're gonna add 30
degrees and then back to gray scale. I'm gonna erase that background. I'm gonna
duplicate this layer and I'm gonna take this magenta layer, put it in my main
file here, and just kind of snapped in. Let's go ahead and label these while we
have it open. Alright. And lastly we got the yellow. We're just gonna do the same
thing again. Big map. We're gonna add another 30. We're gonna go back to gray
scale. Erase the background. Duplicate the layer. Must be hidden with some
shortcut on that. Keyboard shortcut I don't know about. For the blending options.
So I keep popping that window up. And the yellow. We're going to pop that in place.
Now yellow is a predominant part of this design and right now I have it sitting
on top here. So notice how this file does not look right. It's a lot of yellow on
top of a little bit of blue there. The reason that it's like that is because we
just have these color overlays on these layers here. What we need to do
is we're gonna create an extra layer to put underneath each of these. And we're
going to merge them down so that they don't have a layer effect anymore. Now
they are their own layer and we're gonna change all of the the the layer styles
to multiply. You notice when I do that all the colors look correct. Here's what
happens. This is how the color is going to lay on the shirt. Let's go ahead and
add a new layer in there. We're gonna add a new layer. We're gonna make this the
shirt layer. And I'm gonna fill this layer with the color. Let's just use white
for now. And then we'll play with colors later. Now let's find a good spot. There
are... imagine each each little section as a square. I know this is really zoomed
in. But there's no real green in the design. This this green is part of the
quadrant here. It's laying over... it's blue laying over yellow. And that makes the
green shade. Over here we've got blue laying over magenta. And when they
overlap they make the different colors. That's how you get so many colors in a
process print. Because you're using those four colors but to the eye is zoomed
out. You know it looks like this. You get a nice vibrant full print. When you don't
turn the multiply on for each of the layers. So you have it all normal. The yellow
that fills in the spots that there is nothing looks the same as it would. But
here where the yellow is overlaying other colors you're not seeing it. So the
yellow overlays the magenta here to make a red. And that overlays a blue to make a
green. And then in here it just fills in it. It looks more like a brown tone when
you look at it from farther away. So these are all separated out. This is you
can send this to a printer and they should be able to print. The one thing I
like to do though is I'll put a color overlay of black online before I send my
files off that way. It's like easy for someone to say okay all I gotta do is turn
on this color overlay to print it. So then I just turn these off. And there's
the file it's it's good to go. I mean the printer should add registration marks
and any other kind of printers marks. There's usually you know colors color
bars and things like that. But if we printed this shirt it should look pretty
good. You notice that we lose a little bit of the detail here. As a whole it
looks pretty good. So hopefully that helps you understand kind of what we do
when we separate colors out. Yeah maybe I'll do some more videos sometime. Thank
you Jimmy O for the artwork and thank you guys for watching. Hopefully you can
now separate your artwork for a process later.
