If you want to print halftones from Photoshop and don’t have a RIP then you can convert each channel to halftones – keeping in mind that your printer needs to print very dark and usually on the highest photo quality setting (very slow!). Click on image for larger display.Ī true RIP converts any gray levels to halftones and tells a “dumb” inkjet printer to lay down a heavier deposit of ink. And a channel that is a Spot Color can be printed out of Illustrator or Corel (RGB does not print but you MUST keep the RGB header in the file). In Photoshop – any channel that is a Spot Color will print. The file starts off as an RGB file and then each color is “pulled” and/or created and made into what is called a Spot Color Alpha Channel. The following image is what a Channel Separation looks like in Photoshop.
SPOT COLOR SEPARATION ILLUSTRATOR REGISTRATION
Also, printers often make templates with registration marks, gray scales and other details that they “place” the separated image in before printing. And, if you want to add additional vector elements to a channel separation you can do so once you bring the file into your favorite vector program – as long as the elements you are adding are one of the Pantone colors used in your image. A lot of printers want to print from a program they are comfortable with.
SPOT COLOR SEPARATION ILLUSTRATOR HOW TO
If you know about the history/background and reasons to do this….you can jump ahead to just the section about how to print from your favorite vector program. People print from Photoshop all day long. It is shocking to hear people tell us “Adobe said I needed to print from Illustrator.” Oh well. There are details and a reason this may not be a great plan later in this article.įor some reason a lot of people are told “you can’t print for Photoshop.” That is one of the biggest lies ever told and perpetuated by Adobe. Note: If you don’t have a RIP but want to print from Photoshop you can cheat a little and convert the channels to halftones. Channel separations can easily be printed out of Adobe Photoshop but they need to print to a RIP (raster image processor) like T-RIP in order to get halftone dots.
And, if you don’t have an automated program and do it “manually” then this is also what you end up with. This is how automated color separation programs like T-Seps make separations. It is very common to create “channel” color separations in Adobe Photoshop.