Separation guides
Practical, vendor-honest guides to color separation for screen printing — written by the team building PrintSeps.
The guides
- Spot color vs simulated process — which separation type your artwork needs, with a decision table and halftone starting points.
- How to make film positives from a PNG — resolution, separation, halftones, dot gain, and film output, end to end.
- Color separation software compared — plugins, desktop apps, online tools, and human services: an honest map of the options (including our competitors).
- Simulated process separation, step by step — ink set, underbase, channel splitting, one-angle halftones, and print order on press.
- Underbase choke: how much, and why — the numbers in points and pixels, and how press, mesh, garment and art style move them.
- Halftone LPI vs mesh count — which line count for 110, 156, 230 and 305 mesh, the ratio behind it, angles, and dot gain.
- Case study: four screens on light, three on black — a real job reworked for a black tee with no black ink, decision by decision.