Screen Printers Open - A Forum for Screen Printing and Embroidery

You can create your own spot colors in AI.  I would have to be looking at it to tell you how though.   

when i go to output in Illy in the print dialog box, the only color options are the process colors.  the sep'd color arent showing up.

when i delete the process colors in PS before saving file, my file type options dramatically decrease.  DSC 2 and TIFF are not available.

im really confused now haha

oh and btw im using the CS5 Suite

If you are doing the seps in PS, why not print the seps out of PS and save yourself the extra steps

Exactly my thoughts.

I'm with you guys.  I tried saving the file as a dcs 2 and outputting out of AI, but the conversion turned my images into garbage... So now I stick with PS.

Allow me, it's the only way we do it. Let's assume you have made your separated channels in Photoshop. DO NOT delete the RGB file you started with. For each separation channel, double click on it, and in the ensuing dialog box, select spot color. Next, click on the color chip which will bring up the color picker; if not already there, click the custom colors button, and select the PMS number you want to use. IF NOT USING PMS colors, don't click the chip, just click Spot Color and name it and say OK. Do that for each sep channel. Now, Save it as a straight .psd file, WITH the RGB channels. Once imported into Illustrator, the RGB is what's showing, and looks fine. The sep channels are behind it. In your color pallet, at the bottom, you will have all of the spot colors you named in Photoshop. Go to print, do the page setup thing, then click on out put, change to Separations, then click on each spot color in the print dialog box to set the frequency (LPI) angle and dot shape (elliptical is generally best). Print to a laser printer or to your RIP...

Steve

Johnny do they come back as a vector seperation or as imbedded  Bitmaps.

Damn Steve

That is text book perfect of how to do it, and Thank You for taking the time to post.

So I want to ask one more question if I may.

Why or what is the advantage of doing the printing in Ill?

I do most of my work and out put in PS but many of the seps I buy come back to me in Ill, so there must be a reason I just don't get?

Hi Johnny, that was the way I learned how to do it years ago. We hired an artist who had worked for one of big national companies, and he showed us what he had learned there. The simulated seps would be set up in PS, saved as a DCS file, then brought into Illustrator so that sharp clean vector text could be added. The DCS would bring the spot colors in and add them to the color pallet in Illy so you could then assign them to the text. Then, in the Illy print dialog, we could set the freq, angle and dot shape. They looked like hell in Illy, as Spencer mentioned, but we discovered somewhere that if you left the original RGB in there, then it would display as the original image instead of the seps, but the sep channels are what print. Somewhere else we picked up that you don't even have to save it as a DCS, just a Photoshop file with the extra channels.
Computers were considerably slower back then, so printing from Illustrator with really sharp text wasn't the memory hog it would be printing from Photoshop. We're so used to doing it that way that we never switched. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?

Steve

ps. I'm guessing that Diane sends you Corel files with vector text and bitmapped/raster images for the photo part. I don't have Corel (Mac guy) so I don't know how to check it, but in Illy, if you select all, you can see the wireframe around the vector parts, and the raster is a box with an X through it...