CMYK separations/ Halftones for screen printing.

[Chris Monty]

Hi Affinity Team

 

Firstly i want to compliment you all for the update V.2 version of Affinity and they are a joy to use.

As a screen printer, i really really wish we could do CMYK separations and Halftones to enable to print transparancies as easily as it can be done in Photoshop. For me this is really the only major functions that are missing from Affinity and their addition would make Affinity a real match for Photoshop etc. I am sure there are many screen printer who would come over to Affinity products if this was available. 

 

Keep up the good work and hope you will be adding the above funtionalities soon.  

[vorple]

Yes please. It's pretty much the last thing I need to be able to move on from Adobe.

[Archangel]

I think someone posted a macro to do CMYK separations in Affinity Photo. It's in my version as JR channels.

Re posted here but I cannot remember who actually posted it. Probably James Ritson.

jr-channels.afmacros

[vorple]

Thank you! I'll try that out.

It is a good first step and makes it a little easier, but it's still a kludge in the end.

What I'd really like to be able to do is open a file, choose Print, and select Separations as an option in the Print dialog. 

I'm an artist and I'm only printing my own work, so maybe dealing with 10 images or so at a time to process. Even that amount of processing means that with every manual step you have to do is wasted time, and more importantly, opens up more points of failure for errors, which leads to wasted film, or bad screens and wasted paper and ink.

Scale that to even a small commercial screen printer and it just becomes unwieldy.

Edited June 19, 2024 by vorple

[vorple]

After spending many hours researching this, looking at the solutions for separations/halftoning, and watching a bunch of videos about how other people are doing it ...

Most of the solutions either required Photoshop as the host for a plugin, or required Acrobat to print the separations from. Given part of my goal is to no longer need either of those programs, none of them satisfied the goal.

The rest needed a program that generated separations and then ran them through a RIP to generate the halftones. Affinity Photo doesn't generate separations, so that doesn't work either.

So I just bought Corel PaintShop Pro for under $100. Get the work completed in the Affinity tools, open in PaintShop Pro to print the separations.

Kludgy? Sure. But it's fast, works, and it doesn't need Photoshop or Acrobat.

[loukash]

4 hours ago, vorple said:

a program that generated separations

Ghostscript
For MacOS here: https://pages.uoregon.edu/koch
Also available via Homebrew: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/ghostscript

More on all that: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/search/&q=Ghostscript&quick=1