How can I creat a screen in publisher

[barkingdog]

I do some work for offset presses and sometimes apply screens to the artwork. How would I do this in Publisher?

[firstdefence]

Welcome to the forum @barkingdog

By screens do you mean overlays, like textures, patterns, etc?

[Pšenda]

4 hours ago, barkingdog said:

apply screens to the artwork

Example? 

[barkingdog]

Yes tiny dots arranged in a pattern. This is used in all three Affinity Workbooks see Pgs. 343, 345 of the Publisher Workbook. All offset printed colors except CMYL & spot are most likely a screen. I can do it in pagemaker; I can do it in  Indesign. I'm sure I can do it in Publisher. I just don't know how.

[Pšenda]

5 hours ago, barkingdog said:

Yes tiny dots arranged in a pattern.

You mean Halftone? (I don't see anything similar/dots on the mentioned pages in my APublisher Workbook)

https://affinity.help/photo2/English.lproj/pages/Filters/filter_halftone.html

[barkingdog]

Yes Halftones. You need a magnifying glass. That gray on the right side of the page is actually black dots.  The bigger the dots the darker the gray, or the more dots the darker the gray. The blue picture on page 402 is one color. The darker color has more dots than the lighter color. 

The young lady on page 262 is made of four color dots. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). In PageMaker or Indesign I could enter the number of dots per inch and the angle; and print the separations (4 pages of black dots, CMYK). From this the printing company would make his four plates. Today I email a file of the separations to the printing company.

Wikipedia explains this much better than I can. Just type in CMYK.

There are fewer printing companies around these days. I can't afford Adobe.

[firstdefence]

To help people understand what @barkingdog is talking about, see the links to the processes from within Indesign...

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/inks-separations-screen-frequency.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/preparing-print-separations.html

Next here is a video to get the CMYK separate layers in Affinity Photo and I've added a file to show how to add halftone using the live halftone filter.

Is this something close to what you need?

Halftone live filter + CYMK separation.afphoto

[v_kyr]

There are also a bunch of online generators for such halftone stuff, as for example ...

• https://halftonepro.com/
• https://halftone.xoihazard.com/
• https://www.picturetopeople.org/image_effects/photo-halftone/halftone-image-generator.html
• http://kleur.werkvanbart.nl/halftone/index.html
• https://www.gifgit.com/image/dot-screen-halftone
• ... and so on ...

[Old Bruce]

On 12/13/2022 at 7:22 PM, barkingdog said:

I do some work for offset presses and sometimes apply screens to the artwork. How would I do this in Publisher?

Are you wanting to skip a step in the printing process? Are you wanting to reduce the greys to actual Black dots in the publisher file so as to not have to do so before you burn a plate?

Or... Are you looking for an Effect?

Photo has the Halftone filter, this does not produce actual line art from the continuous tone image, it is an effect. And to the best of my knowledge is still a continuous tone image which will need to be screened before you print on the offset press.

[barkingdog]

Yes Halftones. You need a magnifying glass. That gray on the right side of the page is actually black dots.  The bigger the dots the darker the gray, or the more dots the darker the gray. The blue picture on page 402 is one color. The darker color has more dots than the lighter color. 

The young lady on page 262 is made of four color dots. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). In PageMaker or Indesign I could enter the number of dots per inch and the angle; and print the separations (4 pages of black dots, CMYK). From this the printing company would make his four plates. Today I email a file of the separations to the printing company.

Wikipedia explains this much better than I can. Just type in CMYK.

There are fewer printing companies around these days. I can't afford Adobe.

I don't print. I provide artwork; the negative used to make the offset plate (so to speak). In page 345 of the Publisher Workbook; the right side of the is printed in black ink. There is no gray ink on the page. Only halftones. Tiny black dots that appear gray because of the white background. That is what I am trying to do. Help  me.

By the way the whole Publisher Workbook is is printed using CMYK with some spot colors. I can do that using Adobe products. Can this be be done using Affinity products.

[firstdefence]

Publisher uses spot colours: https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/pages/Clr/spotClr.html

[h_d]

As far as I'm aware, you can't output CMYK separations from Publisher, which I think is what you're asking.

It doesn't have a halftone generator, so even if you laboriously use Photo to separate individual images, you can't place them as separated images on your pages, you can't separate solid areas of CMYK colour, and there is no mechanism to export full-page separations from an .afpub document.

EDIT: you could print to a RIP rather than export, but there would be an additional cost. Examples: Colorburst Overdrive (starts at $795) and PrintFab Pro. (€129).

[barkingdog]

I think we're making progress here. Could I be using Designer or Photo? I think I'm seeing on google that this can be done. Any idea how this was done for the Affinity workbooks.

[Alfred]

27 minutes ago, barkingdog said:

Any idea how this was done for the Affinity workbooks.

I’m pretty sure the Affinity workbooks were created in PagePlus, Serif’s older and more mature DTP software. The first version of Affinity Publisher didn’t have suitable features for consolidating chapters written by multiple authors.

[h_d]

1 hour ago, barkingdog said:

I think we're making progress here. Could I be using Designer or Photo? I think I'm seeing on google that this can be done. Any idea how this was done for the Affinity workbooks.

I would imagine Serif sent CMYK formatted pdfs to their printer, who used their own separation software. That is pretty standard practice. You are barking up the wrong tree if you want to create colour separations with any of the Affinity apps.

[barkingdog]

OK! Thank you everybody. I was able to do what I wanted in Designer. The printers that make copy for are small Mom & Pop. They will hang me out to dry if the copy is bad. I don't want to lose anyone. Thank you again.

[prophet]

2 hours ago, barkingdog said:

I was able to do what I wanted in Designer

And how did you do it? Just to bring some closure to the discussion here.

[Pšenda]

51 minutes ago, prophet said:

And how did you do it?

Maybe "InDesign" was meant instead of "in Designer"?