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Posted

I bought into Affinity yrs ago to use for t-shirt designing. But I quickly learned there was no easy way to separate the colors to produce my screens. So I basically abandoned it after wasting hours learning it and looking for a work around. 

Id like to give V2 a try. But has there been an easy means of separating colors worked into the upgrade?

Posted

It doesn't look like it. Also doesn't look like you can convert channels to grayscale layers to apply halftone filters to.

But, I'm not sure any photoshop-type software is really going to do a good job of this for screen printing by itself. Usually people use specialized separation and/or RIP software for this sort of thing since printing rasterization is a whole complex can of worms by itself.

It seems like anything suitable will cost about US$200......

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Posted
7 hours ago, Saxon Bastard said:

Also doesn't look like you can convert channels to grayscale layers to apply halftone filters to.

The channels mixer adjustment does it easily.

 

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Posted

Yes, that's true (I was looking in the wrong place). So you could do something like this and even create a macro for "poor mans color separations":

image.png.58ce2819fadd6c9ad0bc9d6b785f17f0.png

But the problem is that you'd also need to profile for the non-linear dot gain and tone curve and other stuff that is very complex and difficult, and is the reason why there is a bunch of expensive specialized software that does nothing but color separations.

People don't rely on photo editing software to do color separation and RIP for professional printing.

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Posted

I created a full tutorial

 

Mac mini M1 A2348 | MBP M3 

Windows 11 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 | Dell 27“ 4K

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

I use iPad screenshots and videos even in the Desktop section of the forum when I expect no relevant difference.

 

Posted

Are you using Photo or Designer?

In Designer:
I thought I'd see what the process was like to print separations. In the print dialog I see no options for selecting the color separations. The software allows me to assign spot color, but what good are they if I cannot access them in the print dialog? In Illustrator there is an "Output" tab, where is the equivalence in Designer?

Posted

There is no „color separation“ function build-in any Affinity app, neither export, nor print.

Instead, you can use the methods from my tutorial to create such separation with a few easy steps. It works for all 3 Affinity Apps.

Mac mini M1 A2348 | MBP M3 

Windows 11 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 | Dell 27“ 4K

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

I use iPad screenshots and videos even in the Desktop section of the forum when I expect no relevant difference.

 

Posted

I've experimented just a bit.
Printing to PDF does not work.
You can export to PDF, then with Acrobat have much better print controls. I was able to print my separations from Acrobat.

I have Acrobat Pro, so I don't know if the same level of print functions are available in the free version.

Posted

Ok yes you can do some rudimentary stuff, but if you're going to do commercial printing it would make sense to spend at least US$200, or more on the order of at least US$500, on some software specialized for your printing process.

It's been a long time since I worked for a printer, and we did a bunch of "redneck engineering" when it came to lots of things, but we still used super expensive RIP software (more expensive than necessary, but hey vendor support) for stuff like this.

Still, some rudimentary support for color separations and screens would tend to fit in the Export persona...... But trying to do everything in photo software is like the kind of stuff I rigged up in high school for high school projects using unsuitable equipment because we didn't have anything.

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*Sometimes gets used for something other than games.

 

Posted

Thank you all for the input. I will take a look at the tutorial in detail when I have time. My upcoming projects dont require separation but I wanted to find out if that had been addressed in V2 before I decide to upgrade. Honestly, I think there is enough improvement in V2 to justify the purchase even without color separation. I did achieve decent half tone seps using RIP software when I was doing screens. But its been a few yrs and I recall it was not a "seamless" work flow.

  • 1 year later...
Posted

Pacific Pixel has a set of macros to do spot process separations in Affinity Photo.

Works fairly well but is limited in screen frequencies as it has presets for hafltone work.

Another option is to use Graphic Tracer that can generate separations as well as trace files and identify fonts. GT has an excellent auto tracer that keeps matched edges and can directly send a file to Designer.

  • 6 months later...
Posted

The solution I came up with for CMYK process work (with a limitation of not wanting to use Acrobat) is to buy Corel PaintShop Pro, just for printing the separations. Has it built right into the Print settings, and is under $100. Cheaper than pretty much all the other separation software and RIPs.

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