Photoshop can produce spot color line art to rival anything produced by a vector program, but pathetically few photoshop uses understand the terms, let alone know how to implement them.
fred
I agree 100% that vector is not a pre-req for screen printing but, assuming the artist knows what they are doing (ie. doesn't rely on livetrace for everything), how exactly does a vector conversion hurt an image?
Also, maybe I misunderstand you, but if you are talking about solid spot color line art how and when exactly is a pixel going to rival a clean vector line?
It's not, ever.
Not if we are talking about things like line art and text, this is precisely the type of thing illustrator excels at. Why would I want to convert a nice, clean, crisp, scalable vector image into a pixel based raster image when I can just assign spot colors and output directly from illustrator?
Photoshop is a painting program, and I know how to sep from it, but I use it for effects that are not achievable or maybe are not practical to do in illustrator; an example would be chrome, as mentioned above, or an automobile, a person, or any other type of photorealistic or complex painting style. Then I will output a dcs .eps and add my text in illustrator.
Also, when a client submits a CMYK file to me I will re-draw it, 9 times out of 10, in illustrator. And 9 out of 10 it can be sep'd in illustrator as well. If it calls for photoshop I will color it in photoshop.
Requirements for my shop are either a vector image with all text converted to outlines, or a clean raster image sent to size, 300 dpi. In a perfect world I would get that all of the time, but most of the time I don't. Now, i don't know how other shops run, but I know my boss isn't going to turn down work or send
any customer to another shop because someone sent over a low res jpeg or something with halftones, he's going to tell me to re-draw it and make it work. And that is exactly what I will do. And no image goes to press w/o customer approval.
They key, for me, is understanding and knowing when to use which tool.
All due respect, and again I may have misunderstood, but your statements don't make a lot of sense to me. Would you mind elaborating a bit?