How much of a difference will a RIP make when printing halftones on an Epson 1400

Now THIS is going to be a fun one to tackle an i can already tell you I'm going to make some screenprinters cringe with this one.

No you don't need a rip software to do nice halftones. It's much EASIER for your 1400 to process the gradients but you can get the same effect with some tweaking on Photoshop.
Before I could afford accurip I'll tell you what I did. I had a photo of my grandmother I wanted to print on a shirt. Needless to say halftoning the imgae was the best way to do it. So what I did was made the image grayscale, change the format to bitmap. A box pops up. It will give you a list of choices...look for halftone screen. You'll have to play with the settings in that selection. I typically did -circle- 45 by 45. Anyway without showing you myself that's how I got away with halftoning gradients prior to accurip.

Or you could just print it out with rip and be done...time is money! Plus I am not a graphic designer and don't really want to be. It is a lot easier to just let the software do the work.

Yes you can split photoshop channels then bitmaps, open them in illustrator, select each bitmap turn it registration black and then print out the film opaque. Its just easier to use a rip, and ryonets rip is cheap. In a world when everyone wants their stuff yesterday, its just faster, so one less thing to do.

parthenon09 said:

Yes you can split photoshop channels then bitmaps, open them in illustrator, select each bitmap turn it registration black and then print out the film opaque. Its just easier to use a rip, and ryonets rip is cheap. In a world when everyone wants their stuff yesterday, its just faster, so one less thing to do.

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and you get a better result, nicer halftones, smoother gradients.

If you notice, he wasn't asking about halftones, he was already creating them in Photoshop.

A RIP will give you a denser halftone and obviously as already stated and do it much faster. The 1400 is a dye based system. There are no UV inhibitors in the ink, so a denser halftone is needed for your film output. You may be able to do a looser halftone without it, but most likely the higher the halftone, the more of a problem you will have in burning your screen. But you could try it without and see how it works for you.

get a good rip, it is easier to control and outputs much nicer.

Nobody gonna go to bat for the free option, Ghostscript?

BOOSH! said:

Nobody gonna go to bat for the free option, Ghostscript?

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Ghostscript will not increase the density of the films, it will only create halftones. He is already doing halftones via Photoshop.

Aren't halftones made with ghostscript better quality then does made only by Photoshop?

Not necessarily. Photoshop can make excellent halftones, but it depends on your resolution of the file.