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Hello everyone. Like many others out there I'm fairly new to the wonderful world of screen printing. I was recently working on a design in Illustrator and was separating the different colors into layers to print to my positive. There are only two colors to separate but after I use the magic wand in Photoshop its leaving behind small blurry outlines on everything I used Live Paint in Illustrator to fill in. It's like they're separate colors from everything else. I checked to see if my colors were flat and they were. I also didn't know if trapping colors in Illustrator then loading them onto Photoshop to separate and refine would cause a problem so I took the trap off just to make sure. I guess I'm just confused as to why Photoshop is leaving details behind and treating them like separate colors after I magic wand them. Any help would be great. Thanks.
You don't half like making life complicated.
Don't bother with layers.
Download PDFCreator.
Print from Illustrator to PDFCreator, choose Separations.
Learn to play the banjo with the time you've saved :-)
Dave,
Thanks for the tip. I tried that with PrimoPDF which I believe is the same thing as PDFCreator. I created a PDF with 4 pages, 2 being the exact same as the other two. The black color was seperated on its own page but the other color red (which is only an outline), was just created along with the black. Back to the drawing board
OK - we have a file format problem.
Try PDFCreator or AdobePS (from Adobe site) and Ghostscript/Ghostview.
You might change the PPD.
You can change printer settings?
Hello everyone. Like many others out there I'm fairly new to the wonderful world of screen printing. I was recently working on a design in Illustrator and was separating the different colors into layers to print to my positive. There are only two colors to separate but after I use the magic wand in Photoshop its leaving behind small blurry outlines on everything I used Live Paint in Illustrator to fill in. It's like they're separate colors from everything else. I checked to see if my colors were flat and they were. I also didn't know if trapping colors in Illustrator then loading them onto Photoshop to separate and refine would cause a problem so I took the trap off just to make sure. I guess I'm just confused as to why Photoshop is leaving details behind and treating them like separate colors after I magic wand them. Any help would be great. Thanks.
Anti-alias is responsible for the blurry outlines that are left behind after using the Magic Wand. There's a check box for the magic wand tool. Uncheck it. If you're exporting to psd from Illustrator, then there should be a checkbox in that dialog anti-alias as well. Uncheck it there too so that your art comes into Photoshop correctly. When you open up your art in Photoshop you can zoom in very close on the edge of a color and you should see a hard jagged edge. This is ugly at 400% zoom, but it's correct. It will print beautifully if you're at 300 dpi. With the magic wand set for no anti-alias, you can select colors now without fear of leaving blurry edges behind. Keep an eye on this every step of the way as there are more opportunities for you to re-introduce soft edges back into your art even if you started out correctly. For separating simple, solid colors like this, Anti-alias is generally not your friend although it has it's uses even in this situation.. Learn ALL about anti-alias it if you're gonna be doing Photoshop separations.
Thanks guys, you both have been very helpful. I'll have to look into ant-alias and figure out all its intricacies. My color separating adventures are going much smoother now. Thanks again
Color Separation Problems 
