Printing Spots and Halftones without a RIP - Part 4 - The Printing Process

You’ll want the inkless side of your film touching the emulsion when you burn your image. So, depending on the position from which your light source exposes your screen, i.e. from above or below, you may have to reverse the image before printing. This is because when the ink on your film heats up it tends to stick to the emulsion. It washes off in the rinse process, but it ruins your film.

Time to Print

In the print dialog don’t do anything fancy. Select your paper size and print. I have my default Epson driver set to “Draft” settings which lays down very little ink.

If you’ve ever printed through one of the RIPS then you know what it means to wait a while for your film to print. If the image is particularly large even AccuRIP, which is the fastest that I’ve used, can take 10 minutes or more, per color. When printing through the Espon driver the process flies. It takes about twenty seconds to print out a moderate coverage image. Even though it’s faster, the image quality is still excellent! Remember folks, these are high-definition printers, even the C-120. They’re designed to give crisp, highly detailed photographs! Shouldn’t it be able to give yo crisp, clean lines in black? It doesn’t even have to be super opaque black, which I’ll touch on later.

Now that you’ve printed the image hold it up to a bright light to see how it looks. It may be blackish purple with some banding through the image. Now is a good time to test the finished product on your screens. You’ll be suprised by the results. Rarely, it does happen that some of the banded lines are actually separated enough to allow the light through, and tiny, tiny little line gets exposed. If you find that this is happening to you consistently, then you have an option. Run your film through the inkjet printer twice. Just make sure it’s dry and that your paper guide hugs the film through both runs.

I recently spoke with Bill Hood of www.screenprinterstore.com and he cleared up for me, why this works so well. I’ll paraphrase. “When we’re exposing film the purpose isn’t to make sure the unexposed stays unexposed, but rather to make sure the exposed area hardens properly around the unexposed area. So the light-source type, and light-source position, as well as exposure times, coating process, and emlusion type are all more important than the film we use!

If you’ve ever used a laser printer to do your film then you know what I’m talking about. Even after you spray it down with toner enhancer, hairspray, whatever, you know that it is not very opaque at all. yet it works. It even works without toner enhancer. Don’t get scammed by add-ons, like toner enhancer, and scorch remover. Use peroxide for scorch remover. Use aerosol hairspray for toner enhancer. Works just as well.

RIPS work, for the most part, but as I become more and more accustomed the traditions, and proper workings of the screenprinting world, I’m finding that RIPS, like a lot of the stuff sold by some of the vendors out there, cause more problems than they solve, and simply sound sexier than they actually are. My film process, now, without a RIP, has every bit of the quality without the hassle and expense of RIP software. The only thing I recommend AccuRIP for is if you’re interested in doing stochastic process color for your full color images, instead of halftones. You just don’t need it for spot color printing. Period.

I recently sent my RIP back to Ryonet, and now I have a $595 credit to spend on something else useless. Score one for the lousy businessman!

Bless you all!

Coming Up Next - Halftones!!!!!!!