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Good morning,
I am looking to create an action (script) to be able to separate my colors for textile printing... I have attached the information to explain what I would like.
By @Damien28694733evnn
Unfortunately, that PDF doesn't help me much (I thought that it may have spot colours, but it's just RGB).
Is the green colour visually representing a solid print white base ink under the black ink halftone screen of the mushroom? Or is the intent to have a black halftone mushroom printing over a separate solid green ink?
Separations for print output would usually be performed in the channels panel, not layers – using Grayscale, CMYK or Multichannel modes and spot channels as these are ink-based and not based on emitted light as RGB mode is.
Photoshop can do a lot with an action (.atn) or script (.jsx) and there are specialised commercial colour separation tools for screen print.
Hi Stephen, thanks for your replay.
I would like a solid color on the first layer and on the top a halftone layer per colors. It's bad i can't share my script.
I made a graphic to explain a bit more, i hope it will help you.
Thanks a lot
D
@Stephen Marsh Hello, do you need more information from my side to help you ?
Thanks
By @Damien28694733evnn
Yes, more info is needed.
That last graphic really did help me to better understand your workflow!
So now we need to talk about each separate step. As I can't get your French action to work in my English installation, you will have to forgive me for asking the obvious.
STEP 2: Do you have an action that creates the appropriate adjustments to create 2, 3 or more "spot colour" separations? As this is an artistic process, I imagine that some of this can be automated to some degree, however, there are probably a lot of manual adjustments required depending on the image's tones and your colour selection etc.
STEP 3: I presume that you are looking to automate the "conversion" of the gradient map into "separations". And that you don't wish to do this manually? This is no longer artistic, it's purely production automation.
STEP 4: Again, the goal would be production automation, creating true separations for each "spot colour" which are also halftone screened for screen printing.
Can you confirm or provide more info on each step?
STEP 2:
This step is not automatic, on my script, i asked him to do a 'break' when he creates the gradient map layer on top of my picture, so i can adjuste manually color spots ( and add color if needed or change the placement of colors on the gradient )
I think that this step will be critical for the following steps, as automation of editing gradient maps will likely require consistency in the setup of the number of colour stops etc.
Do you use a preset for 2 colours, 3 colours etc? I understand that the actual colour stop values will change, however, I am looking for consistency in the positions of the various colour stops and their spacing etc. If it is only the colour that will change and nothing else then that is great!
STEP 3:
Yes, it's that. This is the importante part of the script where i blocked. Yes, this part is purely production automation. The objectif is to convert each color of the gradient map pannel i created into layers.
I can see two options here:
1) You manually run an action or javascript to convert to layers based on the number of colours in the gradient map. So if you know that the gradient map is for a 3 colour image, then you would select and run the appropriate 3 colour action or javascript to create 3 "separation" layers.
2) I don't know how or if it is even possible for a javascript to automatically determine how many colour stops are in a gradient map adjustment layer. However, if the gradient map adjustment layer was named with a 2 or a 3 etc (i.e. 3 colour gradient map), then a javascript could automatically run the appropriate layer separation routine based on the number in the adjustment layer name. This depends on the previous answer to STEP 2 for the gradient maps to be consistent in their construction, apart from the colour values.
Step 2 to 3 require a consistent gradient setup if you use an action or javascript to change the colour values. The reason is that it is not just the colour values that are recorded, it's the stop positions and other slider values that are also recorded and changed by the action, even if the only thing done is to change the colour.
So if your action was for a 2 colour conversion, but slider stops were in different positions, the action would change and reset the positions and the colours, which you wouldn't want as you are only looking for a black and white version with the same stop positions.
A more advanced scripter than I might be able to only change the colour stop values without changing the stop positions, but that's beyond me and may or may not be possible.
As I use an English version, you will have the same issues if I try to record any action steps to help you, some steps may fail in the French language version. Javascript doesn't have this issue.
It's basically doing what you would do manually, duplicating the gradient map 2 or more times and adjusting the colour steps to black and white to create a faux separation.
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