In this post you will learn how to color separate a basic image using Photoshop.
One thing you need to realize as a screen printer is that pulling a squeegee is only a small portion of the overall process of printing. In fact, the majority of your work should be done in the preparation stage, not the printing stage. The preparation stage begins with artwork. Some common questions you should be asking yourself when planning your artwork are: How many colors am I working with? Is this going to have halftones? Is this a process print? Spot color? Blend? These are all things you must familiarize yourself with.
A critical step in the printing process is learning how to color separate. Whether you have created an image from scratch or you already have an image from somewhere else, you will have to color separate to print a multi-color job. Let’s take a look at the process:
Like with anything in screen printing there are several ways of color separating. You can create your artwork on separate layers or channels; you can use a color separating program (usually around $700-$1000), or you can use Photoshop. In this tutorial, I will go over the method I most often use, which is the color range tool in Photoshop. Let’s begin with an image that we want to color separate. We will use Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell's soup print.
1. Copy the image, create a new file and paste the image onto the art board.
2. Take note of how many colors your working with here. (I see 5: white, black, red, yellow, grey, though one of these colors will be the background of whatever you are printing on). So, this is a four color job.
3. Click select > color range
a. There are two ways to use this tool. You may select sample colors or use the colors Photoshop has already selected.
i. If you are working with a complicated image with lots of colors you may want to use sample colors and select the colors yourself. This tool works like the magic wand in that you click on a color in your image and Photoshop will find everywhere that color appears in the image. You can also play with the fuzziness to select more or less of the color (more on this in part 2).
1. Note that in theory, using the select colors will be the most accurate way of reproducing an image. However, there are nine selected colors, do you have a nine color press?
ii. The other option is to use the color Photoshop already has in place
ii. The other option is to use the color Photoshop already has in place
4. Using the colors Photoshop has in place begin with reds and click okay. Photoshop has now selected all the red that appear in the image. Click control, shift, I or select inverse. Go to your channels and click save selection as new channel.
5. Repeat this process for the Shadows (blacks)
6. The grey presents a bit of a problem. Click halftones and you’ll find that Photoshop is picking up too much grey (note how it picks up grey in the red lettering of “tomato”. So, for the grey you can just use sample colors.
a. Click sample colors, move the dropper over any grey in the image and click. You can now adjust the fuzziness to get the grey in the image that you actually want to print.
7. Similarly, if you try to use the yellows it will not find a good enough sample. That’s okay just use the sample colors again like you did with grey.
8. You now have 4 channels, if you click the eyeball for them all you should get a solid pink image like this:
9. That’s it, you’re done. However, if you look very carefully, you may notice that the color range tool wasn’t perfect in selecting the colors. That is because the image used was not perfect. You will get best results if you use a high resolution image. If you are ever taking on a job for someone with an existing logo or image make sure to get a high resolution image before you begin to color separate.
In part 2 of this tutorial I will go over color separating an image with complex gradients.
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