I've been an artist and color separator, now a screenprinter myself pulling squeegees, for almost 10 years, and my experience in the industry taught me that I had to make my own way and find my own solutions in order to actually work with color separations in a way that relates to what happens in the real world with the screens and inks on press, and it has been quite a learning experience to see that the 'industry standard' tools are all nothing but garbage and gimmicks, hogwash and snake-oil. Simply running a color-wheel test pattern through most color separation plug-ins reveals just how terrible they have been set up and programmed to pull the colors, really it is like some people just make actions and programs without doing any real research or printing. It is possible to hold good tonal ranges on screens and print a full-color simulated process without any adjustments except for screenmaking and printing - the dot-curve quality control - but you would need a color separation method that actually captures the right gradients of the colors non-destructively so you can reproduce all the blends. It's the major reason why additional colors are used besides the inherent capabilities of halftone screenprinting accuracy, where using additional greys or tints/shades/hues blending gives the ability to not have to try and hold a full tonal range of halftones on each screen. The starting point of any separation should be to accurately capture the blends of the colors either as full-gamut or based on the inks to be used, but there should never be destruction or loss of color gamut right out of the gate.ĩ out of 10 color separation programs are going to produce destructive conversions of your original before you even get started in trying to adjust or tweak anything. Click to expand.By default, without any adjustments, the separations are already inaccurately produced and have flaws.

Spot process separation studio 4 full