Shirt.Woot

rhochstrasser wrote:Thanks for pointing this out! Makes perfect sense. The purple squiggly line and gradient rectangle have areas of solid color but the created halftones in the tutorial lose the solid colors (the top of the gradient should be solid purple, but it's not).

What's the best method for changing the grays to blacks in the bitmap? Levels? Thanks!

Copy the Alpha channel of the layer you are working on. It is a gray scale image with white representing fully opaque parts of the image and black representing fully transparent parts of the image. Invert the gray scale image and you have a image that's ready for halftoning.

kevlar51 wrote:nice tips. and when in grayscale, I've found the dodge and burn tools to really help a lot in shaping the gradient that will become the halftones.

Like.

haxrox wrote:For my fellow designers using the free, open-source Inkscape, here's the halftone tutorial.
Since Inkscape tends to hang with lots of shapes onscreen, I recommend NOT doing a union of the tiled clones, but rather taking a quick screenshot of them and then tracing the resulting bitmap into a path.

As a soapbox sidenote, if you're creating intellectual property that you want to sell (ie a shirt design), using pirated software is first-degree hypocrisy.

I am a fellow Inkscape-user. This tutorial is great and says it all, just one piece of advice. When creating your halftones, I find it useful to create the tiled clones on a different layer than the orignial image (the halftones should be above the original image), as it makes deleting the original picture and playing around with the halftones much easier.

Does anyone know of a good halftone tutorial for Corel Paint Shop Pro? Preferably Paint Shop Pro X, but any will do.

The one I found on the internet seemed like it was more for scrapbooking. I tried using the photoshop tutorial and applying it to Paint Shops functions but I'm having a hard time.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

This might be a stupid question but I have to ask it. Can halftones only be used to create the illusion of darker colors or is there a way to use them to create the illusion of lighter colors?

naecroknight wrote:This might be a stupid question but I have to ask it. Can halftones only be used to create the illusion of darker colors or is there a way to use them to create the illusion of lighter colors?

i'm not sure i understand the question, but i'll give it a shot. halftones enable you to combine a colour in front with the colour in back, analogous to using a semitransparent layer over a solid (opaque) background, but using solid spot colours. if the colour in back is dark, the combined colour is darker than the foreground by itself. if the colour in back is light, the the combined colour is lighter than the foreground by itself.

Can anyone tell me why they don't submit a multi-channel DCS file and let Woot generate the halftones on their end? This is the way most simulated process work (which is what you are doing) is printed.

Flipit wrote:This is NOT simulated process work. What is described above is SPOT COLOR. When I get a file from the artist, I simply select the colors and place them in channels. This is why it is important for each color to be very defined.

Simulated Process is good for Photorealistic Images. When I do Simulated process, I start with an RGB image(and do LOTS of tweaks on it), not a DCS multi-channel image. This requires a special plug-in for Photoshop. Pretty involved, and not particularly friendly for a shop that does the Deadline Intensive volume that we do here. (BTW, I quit using DCS files and now save everything as a pdf. Much faster and less headaches.

I'm saying simulated process in the sense that you are simulating colors beyond the colors of the ink for that print. I do this quite a bit in my screen printing shop. I don't mean the flaming skull or NASCAR style simulated process.

What I would really like to know is, if a designer submits a multichannel file, can you print it? I do color seps all the time, and it seems to me Woot as the print shop would want control over the halftones you print. Don't you get people using a lot of weird angles, like 90 degrees?

Anyway, if the file is set up as a DCS 2.0 with each channel assigned a PMS spot color, can you use it?

Also, what mesh counts do you typically use? I would like to avoid moire causing LPIs (e.g. 52 LPI on a 156 mesh).

And thank you so much for answering. I was hoping a member of the staff would weigh in.

Thank you! thank you! thank you!! this was perfectly what i was looking for i wanted to mimic the style of that zombie shirt (of which i bought 1) and wanted to try that with my first ever shirt design. this write up was a god send!

http://shirt.woot.com/derby/entry/66062/a-spoon-full-of-pea-soup

Here's a good alternative technique to halftones by Nathan Stillie. Both are good. It all boils down to preference.