Color Separation For Screen Printers

[denk]

Besides Adobe Photoshop as a photo editing program it is also used as a tool to color separate images for screen printing.  I can easily pull colors from an rgb, cmyk and grayscale image to make up my final color separation in a rgb file.  After pulling colors from the grayscale and cmyk image I just drag and drop the channels to my rgb file.  With the color range tool I can pull my yellows and reds from an rgb file.  I can pull my light blues, dark blues and greens from a cmyk file.  And I can create my white base for dark colored garments from a grayscale file.  The final print on the garment comes out pretty close to what I see on screen without changing any color profile in Photoshop.  I can assign a color for each channel from the Pantone swatch or I can visually match the actual ink color with a rgb match.  To simulate how it will come out on garments I adjust the solidity per channel to give me a good visual of how it will look on a garment.

 

Screen printers who don’t know how to separate colors end up spending hundreds of dollars in separation software.  Quikseps, Ultraseps, Screen Print Separator and many others.  Affinity Photo on the other hand is very affordable.

 

Right now I can’t seem to find those kinds of features in Affinity Photo, desktop or iPad.  And if It is there with color selection tool it’s not very convenient.  Maybe you guys can add functions to automatically pull basic colors like yellow, red, light blue, dark blue, green, black etc.  Or maybe a screen printing version of Affinity Photo.  Or maybe a screen printing mode within Affinity Photo.  Just an idea.  Even better add a RIP so screen printers can print the separations to their inkjet printers with specialized inkjet film directly from Affinity Photo.  Printers spend hundreds of dollars again on RIP’s alone.  If you guys can put these simple functions into Affinity Photo I think this will be a good alternative to Adobe Photoshop.