Hey Springleapers

I know a few people out there are not having a fun time with trying to get photos and paintings onto our site since we have a restriction on colours.

So what’s the big deal with Photos and Paintings using Silkscreen?

Well – in silkscreening, each colour is laid down as a separate “spot” colour. Most machines out there are 9 or 12 arm “Octopus” like machines. Each arm takes a screen, and the last arm is reserved for drying purposes.

The real issue at hand is that each colour requires a new set of screens/positives. These are really HUGE expenses to absorb so unless you are doing large print runs (like min 500 units per design – but preferably 1000 – 1500) it means that when you do small runs you have to watch out as each colour adds a lot of cost.

So doing a full colour photo is simply not possible – sometimes if you have cool colour indexing software and a designer who really knows what they are up to, you can use half-tones.

WHAT IS A HALF-TONE?

When you print silkscreen, you can achieve a “half tone” of a colour buy pixelating the paint – so it fades out into dots. This is a Halftone – so when you are doing a gradient, it is achieved by this fade effect into the background colour.

Half-tones are really useful when the dots of a specific colour are mixed with the dots of another that overlap to create a new viually mixed colour. So red and blue together give the illusion of a new purple-like tone and so on.

By using half-tones intelligently, one can “mix” new colours without printing them. The results can be really awesome. When submitting work in halftones – all those tones must be supplied separated and on different layers.

Many designers work on paper first using pencil, paint etc. These cannot just be scanned in an printed – the best thing is either colour separate it, or even better : learn the art of changing a raster into a vector graphic.

A raster graphic is made of pixels of colour and this is how our eye or a camera visually captures the world around us. Vectors are based on math so no matter what the size the information just gets micro or macro – but no information is lost in resizing like with raster graphics – if the dots of colour are not present then the PC can’t add them. The result of resizing Raster graphics is a lot of noise and blur.

Vectors guarantee easy scalability and no loss when you resize your images.

SO WITHOUT MUCH FURTHER ADO

Here are some links to sites with information on how to convert a Raster graphic to a Vector.

Check out

graphicsoft for a good broad base of definitions regarding graphics in general – especially electronic graphics.

Sketchpad offers users some great tutorials and a more in depth breakdown.

Bits and Pixels have a great tutorial to get you started in the right direction to change those rasters into vectors.

Vextrasoft offer Vextractor – a program you can try out which claims to do the job.

Of course you can get programs like Abode Illustrator that allow have autotrace features as well as the right kind of tools to do it yourself.

Well that’s a good start, so check it out and tell us how it goes here – perhaps also ask some of the Springleap Gurus like DustyRich, TokyoGoGo, Sebell, AntiNexus and Integral Apparel – whew! There are tons of them at Springleap and eveyone is usually keen to help!

Enjoy and be delightened!