Silk Screen and Halftone dots

I don't think that printers are necessarily "money Grubbing" particularly. I would suggest probably, if anything they’ve become LAZY and DUMB. I strongly believe that since this topic was first raised in April 2009 (4 years ago) the whole printing and pre-press industry has been so dumbed down to the point where a true "craftsman" now days is hard to find. We’re all being forced to go with 'standard'. Many have surrendered to the whole 'push-button-buy-off-the-shelf/McDonalds' kind of mentality — there’s no skill any more.

To a large extent the demands made by the average customer have driven this phenomenon and a big part of that revolves around cost. Probably because so much of what we consume today is produced in China, much of which is utter CRAP I might add. So that's what the market has come to expect. People want everything yesterday and don’t want to give anything any real serious thought.... until suddenly there’s a problem.

I have a customer who complained that there was something wrong with their logo which I designed for them and supplied as a.jpg (that's what they wanted at the time — probably so they could use it in a Word document and print it off on their office inkjet). Problem was it printed out a different colour with every different printer they took it to – from business cards to large scale signage, etc, etc. all on different substrates using different inks. Of course they didn’t tell me that’s what they were going to do, but they rang me months later to complain about the problems they were having with their logo. None of the printers wanted to take responsibility or could explain what the problem was. Of course, it was all the designer's fault (me) because that’s what the printer told them. What a LAZY, DUMB answer! Just covering their butts no doubt. I explained how the problem was related to how each different print device is calibrated slightly differently, resulting in the variations in colour she was seeing. She didn't want to know about all that. In her opinion the whole printing industry should have more fool-proof systems that guarantee more consistent results. I advised her to make sure she always took a colour sample for them to match to, so they can adjust their equipment accordingly.

I find it inconceivable that a printer’s first response is that there’s something wrong with the artwork — they all worked from the same piece of artwork but with all different results! Printers aren’t skilled craftsmen like they used to be. They’re just copy machine operators with no real understanding. (This doesn’t apply to any SKILLED craftsmen reading this)

Sorry if I was ranting...

What a huge topic!

Yes, this has been a good discussion, both before I leaped in and after.  I love learning!

Perhaps if I talk to the right person at the replication shop (whoever actually does the setup for printing the silkscreen disk labels) I might discover that he has a printer driver (and therefore a print dialogue) that has all the needed options to do the screen the way that works best for his equipment - if so, then I'm happy to leave it alone and let him do his thing.  But since the physical replication of the DVDs isn't even done in Japan (the factory is in Taiwan, I think, because overhead is cheaper), the printing may be done there as well, so I might never meet the actual silkscreen guy.

My lack of Postscript printer isn't really related because I won't be printing anything myself - all I have to do is give the replicator my Illustrator file, as long as my text is outlined and my graphics not linked.  I was surprised that they don't even care if the objects in the different colors are separated by layer or not - I sort of assumed they would want me to give them a file with all the white on one layer, all the purple on another, and all the yellow on another, but the guy who talked to me said it doesn't matter to them (of course that was also the guy who wasn't sure if they could do halftone or not).  I'm getting more and more curious to ask them again, but this week is the second biggest holiday time of the year in Japan, so they are probably closed for a few days.

One other thing: you are going to loose the tone in the top 10-20% of your half tone and get dot gain in the bottom 10-20%. There is not a lot you can do about that other than push the levels in your art to allow for it. The amount of dot you gain/loose depends on squeegee sharpness and durometer, mesh count, emulsion thickness, machine pressure, fabric quality and if its printed on a friday arvo or monday morning - neither of the latter are good.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that if the opacity setting for an area of color is low but not zero (10-20%), or high but not 100% (80-90%) then the size of the dots or holes ends up too small for the screen to do smoothly, right?  That makes a lot of sense.  Thanks for the advice - I'll avoid those levels, and I'm sure that others who read this thread will appreciate the tip as well.

I'm trying to use Illustrator CS2 to make a silkscreen label for a DVD.  The replicator company making the DVDs didn't have specific instructions for halftone resolutions (I don't think they had dealt with them before), so I decided I better make the dots myself rather than handing them a file with various transparency settings and hope they know what to do.  Other DVD/CD labels I found that had done halftones seemed to use 42 lpi, so something like that is my target.  I will just be giving them the Illustrator file, not printed masters for the screens, and my printer isn't postscript anyway, so all the PPD discussion don't help me.  But I read CaptureStudio's post with interest - it sounded very promising.

But... it didn't work for me.  First of all, the Pixelate filters are only available after I rasterize.  Okay, so I rasterized my 25% opacity registration-black box (selecting grayscale as the method), and then selected Pixelate->Color-Halftone.  I left the top selection at the default 8 pixels (I think my document resolution is 350dpi, so that's just about right), changed the first three channels to zero (the fourth one was already 45 by default), and selected Transparent for the background.  I was surprised that the first three channels were even there, because in grayscale the C, M, and Y should not exist.  Anyway, I did that, and then zoomed in to see what it did.  But unfortunately the result was not black dots, but a strange gray texture pattern - nothing was black, white, or clear.  CaptureStudio, what version of Illustrator are you using?  Perhaps that is the difference.  Or perhaps I did something else wrong.

I have Photoshop and the replicator will accept that, so I could move the file over there.  But unless there is a trick I don't know about, when I open an AI file in Photoshop just makes everything (all its layers, text, vector objects, etc.) all one raster glob, and seems to also add smoothing to the edges of my vector shapes - not best for trying to end up with clean spot-color data.  So if possible, I want to do what CaptureStudio suggested and stay in Illustrator, so that I have clean vector data for everything including the halftone dots.

It's been my experience that when I assign those settings in Illustrator, it's up to the output device on whether to deliver or not.  I haven't been able to get my printer/RIP to give me a halftone dot, just a typical stochastic print.  This has been the case since I started using a software RIP, which in my case, is limited unless I go to Photoshop and print a 1-bit Black and White halftone dot there.

      I notice that your PPD offers many more options. So each printer's PPD file offers different settings per printer manufacture. Thats good to know. What I was driving at was, in the old CorelDraw! 7 software, you could set the dot frequencies and or line frequencies in the actual software. Just as was stated, probability because the printers of that era did not have the capability. As I type this, my mind is forming an action script to accomplish the same goal. It would be a great little feature or plug-in if I can get it to work. Unless someone knows of something similar.

     I'm usually just designing and not actually outputing the films. When I heard that my designs were being sent through 22 year old software in order to get the halftone dots right, I was to say the least puzzled. Had I known that He was having to do that I would have investigated this long ago. I thank everyone for the help. When I figure this one out I will be sure to share.

     So you can't control half tone dots in Illustrator. I'm aware that the printer profile controls some aspects of the dots. The shop I do work for on occasion asked me to save a file for CorelDraw! 7 because Illustrator does not offer a convient way to control dot size and feq. I was amazed to find that He was correct. This was after I traveled 15 mile to his shop to load a PPD file and sat with him over my sholder for over an hour only to find that you can't control the dots with Illustrator. He then sat down and opened the file with CorelDraw! 7 ajusted the dot size and printed it out just fine. This from a software package that came out in 1987. I was schooled by a silkscreener using software that is 22 years old.