P: Restore halftone screen function for printing separations

[Sinoseps]

Why has the Screen function in photoshop CS5 print dialogue box been removed. ??
This function is essential for screen print separators for the Apparel industry and has been part of photoshop since the beginning.
It may be irrelevant in certain industries as postscript printers can over ride these settings.
However in the printing of Apparel this function is still essential for multichannel simulated process separations. Bitmaps halftones or Colour halftones are a very inaccurate and tedious workaround for this so called flag ship program. I'm very disappointed with Photoshop CS5. I will now be forced to use CS3. Why did I bother with an upgrade. ?

This shows Adobe has a lack of understanding of how its customers use there products.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'll comment: I have no idea where he got that rumor, as it's obviously complete B.S.

[tman2012]

Chris. You are wrong. At least in my industry. If you asked anyone on this forum or in the industry and they will tell you that about 90% of the T-Shirt printers use a low cost Epson printer to print films. There is obviously no rip in these printers. That is why guys like me have sold over 10,000 RIPs. And, between me, Accurip, Wasatch RIP, MultiRIP, etc., we all do the same thing. We never had a problem with the Screen function before and again - I might be a small fish in the sea but you mention that you are talking to vendors but you are NOT talking to vendors in this industry. Does it not seem weird that you have not extended as dialog with people who make RIPs? Some comments have been that you are familiar with screen printing but you are not familiar with the people shouting on this forum. The world of screening uses the Epson 4800 series, the 1400 series and the older 2200, 1800, etc., etc. Our needs are no bigger than 13" output and because these printers print very dark with the help of a RIP for ink density and halftone conversion I am still surprised that you would continue to say it is a printer issue. Scott Fresener Here is an idea. My direct phone is 480-212-1078. My email is scott@tbiznetwork.com. My website is www.T-BizNetwork.com. I am known in my little industry as "the guy" who brought a low cost solution to T-Shirt printers. Give me a call.

[tman2012]

At least my "rumor" got your attention. I am just trying get you to see that you are not listening or reading these posts. I feel Adobe is like a politician always getting back to the corporate line "it is a device problem" when in fact you have not been listening that it is a RIP question. Again, if you would simply talk to real screeners you would get it. Walk into a screen print shop. Go online to our industry forums and you would see that Adobe gets beat up on this at every step of the way. I use your product every day and I love it. But every day people tell me they are never going to upgrade. I still use CS4 - every day - to do color separations for customers so I can set the frequency, angle and dot shape. Sorry if I spread rumors.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

In your industry maybe - but we work with printers in every industry, and have to support those printers in every industry. And yes, we do tend to talk to the vendors who make up the majority of the RIP industry. There are more printers out there, and more using the custom screens, than just silk screeners.

[C. Burks]

I think we've offered a pretty thorough explanation. If you need more details I am sure there will be no shortage of the with the people involved in this thread, most specifically, Scott Fresner. He will be the one that speaks closest to your language and has been a product developer for this niche since I got into it.

As for Van Gestel - put yourself in his/our shoes. He's frustrated - we all are. He's not talking to you personally but you respond as if he does. Decaf buddy. Jerry Mcguire here - Help us - help you - help us. Let's all take it down a notch and see if there's something we can do to advance this. The whole reason this conversation is taking place is because for years (and some of us decades) we have all been on the same team. This feature loss is breaking up the team - we're fighting to keep it together.

[tman2012]

I will go now and leave this alone. My guess is between me and the other RIP guys I mentioned above that at least 50,000 RIPs are in use in our little industry and we/me and the other guys are not on your vendors list of who to ask. 50,000 is probably not a big number to Adobe but we have our little niche and just wanted to see why Adobe removed a key feature after all these years. It appears this discussion is not going to resolve anything other than make our blood pressure go up. I do appreciate your time to respond. For now, the majority of screeners are and will be staying with CS4 or earlier. Too bad. CS6 has some nice features.

[C. Burks]

Is there a more blatant way that you could say you could care less about our industry? Is this your personal stance or Adobe's? I'm not trying to be personal - I just typed another comment below suggesting a more cooperative toned down approach for all of us but I am stunned by some of your comments today.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

@Chris Cox ... as for insulting the engineers, I agree with you. I apologize for insulting you guys and I hope you all can accept my apologies. I'm not usually like that. My intention was not to insult, but to merely portray my frustration.

It really is frustration on my part. From our standpoint, it just seems that nothing is being done to correct this. This problem has existed since CS5 and now we are at CS6 and the problem still exists.

The problem you are going to be running into in the future, is the guys that have been waiting to upgrade are finally going to take the plunge and run into the same problem. It breaks their separation process.

Thanks Cliff Burks for explaining my frustration, and Scott Fresner for your input as well. You are heavy hitter and we need more input from guys like you.

Thanks Chris Cox for putting up with my frustration, and again I do apologize for the rashness of my post.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

That is not even remotely what I said.
But when we go talk to RIP vendors about changing their code to help customers, we're going to talk to the ones affecting the most customers.
It's not that we don't care, it's that there's a lot more out there than just yourself.

[C. Burks]

Can you say when the next scheduled release for a new version is?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

No, we cannot.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Hello,

As a RIP developer (in fact was involved in writing our own PostScript RIP), I don't understand why Adobe removed this in the first place.
According to one link it was because it was using level 1 PostScript, which it wasn't (level 1 didn't have support for color).
But the fact was it worked (I was never aware of any issues or bugs from a RIP point of view), especially for all these users who were printing separates, so all they needed was level 1 PostScript. Screen printers don't use Accurate screens, in fact even in pre press most users who do use these kinds of features do so based on RIP pre defined settings, not based on postscript from the application (and as I am sure you are aware most pre press now work from PDF files instead).

I am pretty sure that the halftone commands from Photoshop were no worse than Illustrator, perhaps someone from Adobe can tell me why Illustrator halftone commands are so much better than Photoshop.....

All these guys want is the same level of support they used to have, it worked and its not rocket science.

My biggest issue with the PostScript from Photoshop was that it didn't include the PostScript comments for the color planes. So if you ever do fix this (which I expect is very unlikely) would be nice if you could add.

We added support for CS5 and CS6 by adding a plugin that sends a DCS-EPS file to our RIP that the user can then specify the halftones in the RIP for each channel. But its amazing how many users still don't want to upgrade as they really want to set the halftones in Photoshop not it the RIP.
Its just the way they work.

I will confirm Scotts numbers that there has to be a good 30000+ users out there.

In all honesty as a programmer who has developed both a RIP and application software, I don't buy into the reason Adobe have so far given on why they removed this, it maybe cynical of me, but I cant help thinking this was simply Adobe trying to get users to have to go out and buy a copy of Illustrator as well. They seem to have an architecture of making you need additional programs, let face it anyone with Illustrator really needs a copy of Acrobat Professional in order to run pre flight tools on the PDF's Illustrator creates, why isn't that built into Illustrator ?

Anyway I wish everyone luck in getting this functionality added back...

Best regards

-David

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I thnk I have an interesting possible solution to this huge, huge problem. First off I'm new here, hello. Second this is a huge problem for screen printers of all types. It is a huge problem, Adobe.

Anyway. I use a minum of 4-5 spot splates in addition to cmyk on all my jobs and require custom angles and shapes and the transfer functions. I save the files as DCS2.0 files.

For my CS3 workflow I wrote a photoshop action in CS3 that adds all my spot plates, transfer functions, screen angles and shapes to my files all in one action. I appears as though when I import the action into CS6 and use it make my plates it also adds the transfer functions and screen angles. After saving the file in CS6, I can open the file in CS 3 and verify all the angles and tranasfers are present.

The only porblem is CS 6 can't save a DCS2.0 file correctly anymore and now it includes all alpha channels when saved, not just the spot channels, which is totally wrong of course (Anyone pointed this one out to you Adobe?). All the extra channels have to be deleted, and I use a lot of alphas to do the trapping so its a big pain. Also occasionally the action goes wrong and gives one or two plates a value of 1 dot per inch witch makes the whole plate fail on output and theRIP flushes the plate. This probelm would be impoosble to trouble shooot and fix with CS6.

However my best workaround so far besides just doing all work in CS3 has been to do the work in CS6 and then copy all my finished PS color separtion files into a folder, then launch CS3 and do a batch Action on the folder that turns all the PS files into CS3 DCS files. And then only work in CS3 if I have to troubleshoot screen angles. I would simply do all the work in CS3 but I need to know the new versions in order to stay current.

Sometimes I get the feeling none of the Marketing Execs at Adobe are actual printing people, and that they all attended some printing 101 classes in local JCs where the instructionr covered saving .eps files and where his sole instruction in Transfer Functions was, "And never check these buttons, no uses them, make sure to never check them." And so said marketing execs said, "hey, don't recode that stuff back in, don't you know you're never suppoed to check those buttons?" Arrggh...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I can't find any bug reports about DCS2 in recent years. Please write up a separate report on that, with details.

[PECourtejoie]

I've seen a (crude) workaround for creating your own separation in Photoshop (I don't know why he merges them in an RGB doc, but it might be worth sharing/discussing: https://vimeo.com/2811225#at=0

[Sinoseps]

Hi PEC, thanks for the input. As you said a very LoFi way of doing a CMYK sep.
A good example of what extra work needs to be done just to add lpi and screen angles to a graphic in a newer version of Photoshop.

Old version...color correct in channels add lpi and screen values make sure your custom ink settings are correct then output.

Imagine using the above method for a 12 col simulated process separation. Something which used to take seconds (adding angles and LPI to dialogue box) Now takes hours.

Of course you could forget this above LoFi approach and just output your multichannel or CMYK doc etc from AI or ID , put the angles and LPI in there then output..

I think David Evans is right, they want us to buy a copy of AI or ID as well.

[billy47402018]

I have Ai & ID, But It doesn't always work like that. I just want to know why would you take something out of something that you don't have to. When I spend all of this money on a suit, I expect it to work like it is suppose to. I just think when you sell someone an improved version of something, it should be just that. Not a crippled version that so far as I can tell is just making a lot of people (including me and everyone I know) MAD. I have seen more forums on this subject than anything
other subject I have looked into. Please just make a patch, a bandaid. a plugin, a stone tablet and chisel, something to justify money spent.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Bring back the screen button Dang It! IT IS VITAL!