Quick Simulated Process Separation

Quick Simulated Process Separation and Performance Printing

Repeat sales are golden. No sales calls, marketing, or sweat equity is needed. The customers have seen the quality of your prints before and trust your capabilities. Price is important, but price is only one aspect of repeat sales. Print quality is probably more important in the long run. I used to print for the major department stores, amusement parks and other local apparel companies who then re-sold the shirts. If my shirts didn't sell, commonly referred to as 'sell through', my customer’s client was forced to discount and unload them. If my print quality was inferior to a competitor's, guess who my customer bought from the next time around? Like one of my distributor's said to me, you can pay in the beginning or you can pay in the end. Paying through lost business and lost repeat sales is far more expensive than the supplies you use. Accountants often question costs, but do they realize what you print with determines future success or worse, loss of sales from using products that don't perform? 

Previously we looked at moire and the benefits of choosing correct angles and quality mesh that can print tight register non stop with great print quality. In this month's article I will walk you through an entire design, using simple image mode changes to separate art quickly and easily.

For the design I chose a high resolution photo of a Les Paul Guitar, (I play one in my band so for me its the perfect subject matter!). We then added 'Team Murakami' and some graphic elements in Photoshop using colors from the guitar photo to round out the design and prepared it for the separation work to be done next. The art was placed on a transparent background to make the separation go easier and then I created two duplicate files, one for the color separations, and one for base plate creation saving the original art in a master file for backup. It is very important to save the original and only use duplicate files as the separation technique and base plate are destructive to the original art, it is impossible to return to the original once we modify the files with these techniques so always use duplicate files.

Separating the Art - Index to Sim Process Tricks

Simulated Process separation quality often varies depending on how well the separator knows Photoshop tools like color range, the magic wand, curves; combining and knocking out different selections, using fuzziness on the color range tool to overlap color. It can be a slow painful method to create stunning prints on dark shirts, especially black shirts as they dominate the market in sales nowadays. The base plate also can be a work of art unto itself and when it gets to the screen room the production manager and screen maker agonize over what mesh count to use to.....