half tones - colour seperation.

Found this in depth tutorial by Jimmy Heartcore on 4-colour process separations within Photoshop. It's something I should really try and understand as it will be important to me if I ever needed to take any work to print in the future. We had been shown this in a lecture given by Christian, but he only skimmed the surface and had shown us the different channels and not how to convert each one so they are able to be printed separately.



This is the photo I chose to work with.



These are the individual CMYK layers separated. I did this by going into the channels and then splitting them. This took each layer into different canvases so I could convert each layer into half tone.



Once I had all the canvases open I then converted each one to the required half tone for each colour. I first started with Black. Once in the half tone screen I changed the frequency to 70 and the angle to 45°. Each time I made the half tone for each colour I kept the frequency at 70 and added 30° to the angle every time, so they ended uo like this :-

Black - 45°
Cyan - 75°
Magenta - 105°
Yellow - 135°



I then erased all the white areas on each of the layers, duplicated them and merged them together. This created a much thicker dot and the half tone became more clear.



This is a preview of how the black layer was coming along...







I then dragged each of the layers into the Black canvas, lined them all up, went into each ones blending options and changed the colours. It took me a while to find the CMYK pantones as it isn't very clear how he finds it on the video, but I found it in the end with a bit of luck.



With each of the colour layers I created a blank layer...



...then merged the colour with the blank layer so the blending option had disappeared...



...I did this so I could change each layer style to "Multiply".







Once each layer style was turned to "multiply" the colour separation was completed.



This is it a little zoomed...



...and at about 300% zoom.

I'm glad I have learnt how to do this now. I would definitely like to take this technique into the print room some time real soon. I do have my screen printing elective coming up in April so this is a real handy technique to understand before I start that project.