I bought into Affinity yrs ago to use for t-shirt designing. But I quickly learned there was no easy way to separate the colors to produce my screens. So I basically abandoned it after wasting hours learning it and looking for a work around.
Color Separation Software Free Download
But, I'm not sure any photoshop-type software is really going to do a good job of this for screen printing by itself. Usually people use specialized separation and/or RIP software for this sort of thing since printing rasterization is a whole complex can of worms by itself.
Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.
But the problem is that you'd also need to profile for the non-linear dot gain and tone curve and other stuff that is very complex and difficult, and is the reason why there is a bunch of expensive specialized software that does nothing but color separations.
Are you using Photo or Designer?
In Designer:
I thought I'd see what the process was like to print separations. In the print dialog I see no options for selecting the color separations. The software allows me to assign spot color, but what good are they if I cannot access them in the print dialog? In Illustrator there is an "Output" tab, where is the equivalence in Designer?
I've experimented just a bit.Printing to PDF does not work.You can export to PDF, then with Acrobat have much better print controls. I was able to print my separations from Acrobat.I have Acrobat Pro, so I don't know if the same level of print functions are available in the free version.
Still, some rudimentary support for color separations and screens would tend to fit in the Export persona...... But trying to do everything in photo software is like the kind of stuff I rigged up in high school for high school projects using unsuitable equipment because we didn't have anything.
Thank you all for the input. I will take a look at the tutorial in detail when I have time. My upcoming projects dont require separation but I wanted to find out if that had been addressed in V2 before I decide to upgrade. Honestly, I think there is enough improvement in V2 to justify the purchase even without color separation. I did achieve decent half tone seps using RIP software when I was doing screens. But its been a few yrs and I recall it was not a "seamless" work flow.
This did help, but what I am trying to do is separate a design into 6 different color channels to be used for screen printing. Is there a way that this can be achieved with affinity photo's spare channels?
This would be at nice feature to have. Just have to say though... Yes, Affinity lacks some features Photoshop has (and some relatively minor features missing in the iPad version) which can be annoying to work around. But I think the interface is fundamentally better and for almost everything it's comparable and often superior. Given the stage of development I'm really excited to see where this ends up 5 years from now - it will probably look a lot like the desktop PC market, now that tablets and phones have taken over. The scaffold in there, they just need to finish filling in details, and focus on the interface and core functionality, not endless bells and whistles that are often not of general use (the direction Photoshop has gone - why is frequency separation still clunky?).
I think indeed color separation is needed, for not only t-shirts printing at a bunch of companies, as OP said, also for other print related gigs/tasks. As well, I have not been able to find a way to get a convert dialog with settings (dithering in rendering intent (to activate it or not), and if converting with perceptual, absolute, relative, level of ink, etc, etc, etc) when converting from RGB to CMYK, but this thing is surely due to I bought an AP license very recently, I had used AP beta intensively, but not for that particular matter. I might just have not yet found my "AP style" path to it (you know, good apps do the same, just with buttons in different places). These things tend to be very important for pro work. (I think the brush engine revamp is just as important, as these days is a total need for too many projects, not just pure illustration (my main field now)). To me though, the color mode conversion settings are probably more important of the bunch (I can paint in other apps, but cmyk/print stuff... very few good apps for this, being AP/AD among the best options) together with PDF export (which seems well covered, till the point I've been able to check already).
"Honestly, I was able to separate like I normally would with a little bit getting to know Affinity Photo (and can do it in Designer as well)."
Can you elaborate on this - particularly for Designer? If I was going to guess how you accomplished it, I'd say to put each color on its own layer and then turn each to black pantone and then turn on and off the layers to print each "color"
Now, just to be clear, I am not referring to doing a separation with solid colors or some mild halftones. Similar to the ones you can achieve in Illustrator, I am referring to doing a full 6 color separations. Like the ones used on multi-colored photograph or panting. I have attached one that we did of someone's painting if it helps. Are you able to do the same in Affinity Photo/Designer? I dont see how that would be possible with using just layers.
How can you see how much color would show thought another color? Like when creating purple for example? Do you have some type of effect over the layer that gives you a good representation of how it would print?
Realistically, if you're a novice then trying to get software not made for complex color seps to achieve something usable, is like learning a subject in a class that is being taught in a foreign language. If you knew how to do color seps, then you could mess around with software like this and see what's possible. If you don't know how to do color seps, your best option is to give the print to a shop that has it's own art dept, or you could try one of the various automated systems that "attempt" to produce a good set of seps, but with those, you pretty much always need to have some skills to edit the initial results that they generate.
I've spent time experimenting with all of these programs to see what they have to offer. I can get any of them to do basic seps. Complex halftone separations is a different story. Even if I could do it, the amount of time necessary makes it impractical. If you want to learn color separations, use software that is made for this task. The oldest possible copy of Photoshop or Illustrator are fully loaded for this work. I'm talking, vintage 1990's software. The next best thing is CorelDraw and Corel Photo-Paint. Not as good for this work as Adobe, but still having real tools specifically for color separations. Serif's Affinity programs will likely never stray into that territory. Not unless do it yourself t-shirt printing suddenly becomes very popular in the world.
Thanks for the feedback. I actually already know how to do color separations. I'm well versed in it in both photoshop and illustrator. Since I am new to Affinity, I was hoping there was a way to do them similar to the Adobe products.
With few clicks things are not looking good. I see there is no support for Multichannel PSD files. APhoto can't open them. I use these for full colour Simulated Process separations. They contain many halftone spot channels, sometimes up to 12-15 cols. If I covert the multichannel doc to greyscale or CMYK, it will open in A Photo, and the extra separation channels are visible in the channels palette. However I cant click or view them, all I can seem to do it delete them? Not much use. In photoshop I can access these channels and work on them with curves and all the other tools in the tool box. Then output.
To hide all separation inks on screen except one,Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the eye icon for thatseparation. Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the eyeicon again to view all separations again.
To convert an individual spot color to process colors,click the spot color icon nextto the color in the Document Ink Options list. A four-color process icon appears.Click again to revert the color back to a spot color.
Ifyou want to print an object on all plates in the printing process,including spot-color plates, you can convert it to a registrationcolor. Registration marks, trim marks, and page informationare automatically assigned registration colors.
In the newer RIP-based workflow, a new generation of PostScript RIPs performs color separations, trapping, and even color management at the RIP, leaving the host computer free to perform other tasks. This approach takes less time for InDesign to generate the file, and minimizes the amount of data transmitted for any given print job. For example, instead of sending PostScript information for four or more pages to print host-based color separations, InDesign sends the PostScript information for a single composite PostScript file for processing in the RIP.
b2a8ae9291