tpitman

I've just started messing around with process colors, and while my results have been okay, I can see where you have to understand how the final print will look and know where to beef up some areas and tone down some others. The most recent print I did was of an old Ford coupe I used with some other graphic elements, including my logo, which has a lot of red in it. I had to hit the magenta a couple of times to get the red in the logo to pop, but then it was too heavy in the photo. I also had to go into separate channels to punch up the contrast in some areas. I'm gonna redo the seps and either go into the logo area and give it 100% magenta and 100% yellow, or make it a 5th color. I've also discovered that to really get a good print, certain types of photos will reproduce much easier and be more striking than others. Broad areas of bright color, and a minimum of really fussy detail look a lot better. Plus, on a manual press, no matter how good your seps and screens are, getting consistency from print to print is tough, mainly due to the transparent nature of process inks and the difficulty of maintaining even squeegie pressure from shirt to shirt. Opaque plastisols are a hell of a lot easier to print. I can see a lot of opportunity in learning process color printing for photographic type stuff, and have had just enough success with it at this point to remain deteremined to get good enough to market shirts done as process.

 

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