Re: Fire & Ice Resub
Sorry to come of as combative. As a screen printer, it's clear to me that this would be a challenging print. The main issue is that a lot of your spot colors are 15% and below and 85% and above. A 50% halftone would have positive and negative dots or lines of equal size. If using dots, it looks like a checkerboard. When you have really small dota or lines, they overexpose in the screen burning process due to something called light scatter and undercutting. This means that your smooth gradient from 100% to 0% will close up at about 10%, leaving you with a hard posterized edge. And when printing, the fluid nature of ink causes something called dot gain, which means that 85-90% and above will blob up to 100%. Since a lot of your image lives in the fringes, it probably won't print the way you think it will. It would have to be done with more ink colors, getting into the dreaded and misundestood world of "simulated process". Here's a great video series to learn what simulated process really means. There's a real art to color separation, or else there's real expensive software ($800+). There are 10 videos in this series. Here's the first one.
As for outputting halftones from AI, most people use RIP (Raster Image Processing) software ($500+). In Illustrator, you set your spot colors to overprint in the Attributes panel if you want your inks to overlap. Sometimes I'll set an inside stroke to overprint to create trapping, or a slight overlap between colors. Don't forget your registration marks! This is all stuff that is at the discretion of the printer. You set your angles, DPI, and dot shape in the print menu, send it to the RIP program, and Bob's your uncle. It does the rest for you, producing sharp edged halftones, not pixelly ones like you get in the bitmap method in PS. It probably doesn't really matter that much unless you're doing 100+ DPI, like in offset printing or newspapers. I believe Woot just brings AI files into PS to make halftones anyway. And those PS generated halftones end up printing great - something which I had a hard time believing when I first got here.
What does all this mean? Screen printing is complicated. Woot may have rejected this and the other based on technical difficulty. It would be really nice if the Rejectionator would give a little more detail instead of all this conjecture and pictures with circles and arrows on the back of each one.
