No RIP Film Halftones and Spot Colors - Part 3 - The Artwork

The setup comes in two parts. Artwork, and the actual printing process. So we’ll start with the obvious first.

DO NOT SEPARATE YOUR ARTWORK INTO SPOT COLORS. USE A RICH BLACK PROCESS INSTEAD.

Whether printing on paper, or on a t-shirt, the success of your spot color work depends a lot on how you setup your black images. All film, regardless of the final, printed color, must first be put to film as a solid black image. When you send your spot colors through a RIP, which is controlled by a postscript driver, all color information except black is automatically removed.

We don’t want a SPOT COLOR. Instead, we want a RICH BLACK process color. If you have more than one color, and they touch, you may have to set your colors up up on different layers for ease of use. In Illustrator or Corel, open up the respective color control pallet, and slide all colors CYMK, to 100%. We want our Epson Inkjet printer to open up the floodgates of each cartridge and lay a good layer of ink. If you’re printing from Photoshop, just make sure your image is setup in RGB mode, and that you’re blacks are the deepest, richest black you can find on your color picker.

In Illustrator, your color will look like this:

This is how it will look in Photoshop:

Close-up of the Photoshop Color Picker: