Creating Halftones for Screen Printing - To Rip, Or Not To Rip?

hey screen printers it's ryan here with ryanette in this screen printing instructional video we're going to answer the age-old question to rip or not to rip what's a rip and why do you need it anyway well most screen prints are simple one two color spot color without gradients when you have gradients however you need to have ability to create half tones like the shirt you see i'm wearing now a halftone gives your print depth and also gives you the ability to control and mix color to create prints like spot process and four color process and without half tones your screen doesn't have the ability to pick up or expose a gradient to create these halftones we have two basic options we can create them in an artwork program using a bitmap process or we can use the rip software let's show you bitmapping first in photoshop we're going to manually convert this gradient photo into half tones to do that we use photoshop because it gives us the most control of the image we bring in all the layers of the image all the text those are brought in as vector elements but we can't handle them in vector as you'll see so to do the actual half toning of the image all we're going to do is we're going to go to mode we're going to take it out rgb color first we have to grayscale and flatten it so if you're going to do multiple layers you have to separate that before you go to do this process we flatten it and turn it into black and white which is gray scaling it secondly we're going to go to image in the mode again and we're going to turn it into a bitmap which allows us to input halftones now a bitmap is the worst quality of image that we have it's worse quality than a jpeg so you're going to see it degrade a little bit it does allow us to set our output settings which is typically the dpi of your image so i'm going to put 300 dpi which is probably the best quality that we're going to get and we're going to half tone that so next we're going to put in our frequency and our angle of the halftone which is 45 and 22.5 we're going to use the default settings of accurate so we can compare and contrast later and we're going to go for a round dot now we see half tones pull into the image so from far away it looks pretty good we're at 33 percent right there however as we zoom in 60 and 100 you can see the quality of the halftones is there but it's not very good and what really bothers me is the quality of the vector text now this was smooth and crisp as a vector but if we pull it in here we can see how poor of quality the edge of that text is which is what we're going to get out of a bitmap also if you really zoom into these halftones they're not controlled they're very jagged and it's very hard to control the quality with that next to print the image we can print it with our standard epson printer it's a photo printer so it works best we can't use all black because we don't have a rib controlling the ink itself so we can just have to use color cards or pull from one black we do have to go to print settings you want to choose some advanced print settings best settings to use is premium glossy photo paper and then best quality photo save and then print great as you can see we have successfully printed halftones by bitmapping out of photoshop and using an epson 1430 printer with waterproof film as you can see because a bitmap is such a low quality format image we have a very jagged edge we're not able to handle vector text and the half tones kind of go all over the place they're not crisp they're not precise and we actually have half tones added into the art right here on the edge when we see this design screen printed which we're doing using pitch black green galaxy water-based ink through a high mesh 305 mesh screen which will give us that retention of detail with that high mesh we'll see what kind of results we get so we're going to flood up on this and then we're going to be doing a push print and we're printing onto paper to capture as much detail as we can so overall it looks pretty good starting out of the face we see we can tell it's the face it is a little grainy coming down on the arm we have we're missing some spots here we have some really dark shadow areas and the text that we looked at earlier we see jagged edges and a little bit of speckling around the text overall i think it came out pretty good but i can see if we're giving this to a customer they might want a little higher detail or consistent result and if we're blending halftones like in four color process it might not work out too well that's where rip comes in accurate gives the ability to control the half tone mechanically through the software as well as control the ink and the density accurate also makes creating halftones easy so let's jump into the computer and see how it works first of all we're using illustrator can also use corel or photoshop but since we have text we want to keep that text as a vector element so we're going to keep the quality of the vector there by using a vector program like illustrator or coreldraw by using the rip we also keep the quality of the vector there second we don't have to grayscale this because the rip will automatically print up the grayscale or the tones in this gradient print now let's open accurate and show you how to run the process through accurate so first of all we'll pull up accurate black pearl simply open it up very simple program non-intensive on your resources for your computer very simple to see your settings in accurate once you get it set up you typically don't have to play with these we have the same f7 printer as we printed with before however we're going to print with all black mode because our rip has the control of all the cartridges we can also speed this up and make the films darker by printing in all black mode next we configure our half tones once again our default settings are 22.5 degrees recommended for all types of prints and 45 line medium half tone frequency and that's literally all you have to do the rip does the rest simply go back to the artwork program go to file go to print select your acura printer your defaulted size to a 13 by 19 you hit print it sends it to the rip and you're off to the races and here is the film printed out of illustrator using accurate wow as you can see because the rip handles vector elements and we print it out like illustrator our lines are crisp and smooth and the half tones are much more controlled and have a lot more detail you can also see how clean and dense the film is because the accurate controlled the all black black mac system in the epson printer let's see how the accurate version prints we're using the same ink pitch black water base and the same screen mesh 305 to capture the detail one solid print let's check out the result starting at his face we see that because acura controls the halftones we have a lot brighter and more consistent image and accurate controls the dot gain coming down to his hand and his arm we can actually see the roll off from the shadows and the depth of the print and finally down to the text accurate retained the vector integrity of this image printed through illustrator and there's no bleeding around the text it's extremely crisp as we can see from comparing the two prints accurate does give us a little bit more control a little bit finer detail and a little higher quality of image but really we're looking at different strokes for different folks you know if you're an artist and you just want to create you know a simple half tone prints bitmapping may be a great option because it's free if you're a screen printer and selling your work you want to do more than one color stuff you want to do four color process simulated process and you're doing it professionally charging money for it accurip gives the ability to control makes your life a lot easier and gives your customer a better quality product check out more information on accurate available on screenprinting.com 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Channel: Ryonet

Views: 272,187

Keywords: printing halftones, halftones, halftones for screen printing, rip software screen printing, rip software for screen printing, halftones in photoshop for screen printing, rip software for printing, halftone, halftones in illustrator for screen printing, rip software, accurip, halftones in illustrator, rip software for mac, halftones in coreldraw, water based ink, tutorial, ryonet, rip software tutorial, rip software for epson, t-shirt printing, silk screening, screen printing

Id: wyT1JyQoSUo

Length: 7min 23sec (443 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2015