How To Separate Colors In Illustrator | How To Separate A 5 Spot Color Screen Print In Adobe Illustrator With Printing Results

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How To Separate A 5 Spot Color Screen Print In Adobe Illustrator With Printing Results

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Hi, it’s me. I’m going to show you how to separate a five pillar spot, process job and illustrator. Stay tuned coming up. Let’s dive right into this tutorial, right. Apollo, I’m going to go ahead and open up my t-shirt registration template, which, by the way you guys can purchase check out our link down in the description. We have that available for ten bucks. I’m gonna open this up and we are going to start separating our art. I have it copied into my clipboard. I am going to make this 10 inches wide. You just go up here to the top. I’m gonna hit enter and I’m gonna drag this dude up just a little bit. I’m going to group it real quick. I just hit Command G or Ctrl G for you. PC users out there, and I’m gonna use my line tool. Which, if you don’t have your line tool, you can go to window a line that will bring it up, and there goes Apollo in the background, which is quite appropriate for this piece of art. The next thing I am going to do is, I’m going to bring my registration marks and my center line and then we’re going to dive into the meat and potatoes of what everyone is tuning in for, and that is separating this piece of art out and this is going to go on a red shirt and I’ll show you how that the actual print comes out. Once I’m finished separating it, printing out film and exposing screens getting everything set up on press initially looking at this looking at the kind of wood is a cardinal red and then this black here. Generally if the ink color is darker, and then the color of the shirt will not put any kind of white underbase underneath that, but the yellow and and the white, we definitely will first thing. I’m going to do is I’m just going to hit command shift and G just to completely ungroup this piece of art once. I have my artwork ungrouped. I’m going to go over to my Pathfinder, and I am going to hit divide and now what that will do is just kind of break everything up into its own separate colors and what I’m going to do is hit a on the keyboard, and I think the first thing I’ll do. Let’s just go ahead and start with our black. I’m just going to zoom in. I just hit command and the the the Spacebar Spacebar. First and then command space bar, gives you your hands, so you can drag things around, so I’m gonna hit a on the keyboard and I’m going to select the black and then I’m going to go up here to select, and then same in fill color, so that will select all of my black within this artwork and to zoom out like that guys, just space bar command and option. Your option keys will allow you to zoom in or zoom out. So at this point what I’m going to do, so I’m going to hit Command X and just keep in mind anytime I say command if you’re on a PC and just hit control what I did is, I basically cut out my black, so I’m gonna hit command F just to paste that right in the same place and command. F is the paste in front now. I’m going to go over to my Pathfinder window. Here in hit unite. And what that will do is make that all one objects that way. I can grab this and move it around and I’ll show you why. I’m doing this here in a little bit. So the next thing I’m going to do is select my my cardinal red because this art does already have some spot colors. I’m just going to delete these for the sake of this demonstration. I’m going to hit yes, and then we’ll sign our own spot colors. Forget too far ahead of myself. Let’s go ahead and this is already a black. That’s fine. We’re gonna go over to what I consider a cardinal red slag same and fill color hit command X to cut that, and then command F to paste it in front, and then I’m gonna go down to my Pathfinder, and I’m going to unite that color. Once again, making it into its own shape, its own group shapes that way there’s not separate objects. We can drag this around after that. I’m going to go ahead and select my yellow and we’ll do the same thing same and then fill color and we’re going to hit unite once more and again that just makes it its own little. Just fill color here, and it looks like for whatever reason it grabs a white. So let’s back that up for a second here unless I hit the the wrong keyboard command here. Let’s try that one more time. We’ll select a yellow same fill color there. We go, we’ll unite it! Just want to make sure that it is just our yellow and whatever reason it’s winning to grab that white, no big deal, so let’s just go ahead and grab that white. Well, we’ll get it out of there, select same and then fill color and then we’ll cut it command. F and then we’ll unite that now. We have our white separate. We got our yellow! Excuse me that there’s a black that is dragged over, but you get the idea. Here’s the the yellow. So at this point, we have everything completely separated and what I am going to do is I’m gonna just select my black my yellow. I’m gonna hold down shift. I’m gonna grab my cardinal red, and then my white as well. What I’m going to do is I’m just going to completely cut. Everything out is artwork. I’m gonna hit command a just to make sure there’s nothing behind it and even hit command. Y there’s nothing there. Sometimes what will happen is we did divide, and you actually divide all these colors up. There can’t be a little pieces in there that will actually fill your fill in places that you don’t want filled up, so we’re good on that front hit command. F paste it right back. Where it’s at now we’re gonna sign it. Some spot colors lets. Go ahead and do the yellow first. The yellow is just fine to start with, And now that I’m looking at it once I’m grabbing my yellow. You can see that there is all this extra artwork there. So we’re gonna leave that for Lassen. We’ll fix that. And that’s kind of what? I was talking about, let’s go ahead and do a cardinal red, and I’m gonna sign it. A spot color just like so I got to do is go up to color type select. Spot color hit. Okay, now hanging tells the spot colors. It has this little dot here. If spot color wasn’t a sign, it was just processed, youll. See that little dot’s gone, but we want to make sure it is a spot color, and I’m just double clicking on this little icon. I’m gonna hit, okay. Our black were just letting the black be. It’s its own natural black, part of the CMYK black and then our white. We are going to make a what I would. Call a highlight white or a white top and we’ll make sure it’s just seeing YK for the heck of it. We might add just a touch a cyan to it and I’ll show you why here in a moment and we’ll select spot color. Let’s call this white top. Sometimes we, you make these colors. You kind of need to change it up like say, for instance, we make this yellow a yellow spot. Then it’s gonna just kind of contradict what the program thinks is naturally has its own yellow. Cmyk in there. So if if you try to make a new color, it will tell you that it won’t allow you just to call it yellow. So in this case, let’s call it white top, all right, so we gave it just a little bit of cyan. We’re gonna hit. Okay, and we got our little spot color here with our little dot in it. Okay, so we have our yellow to take care of just for a moment here what I am going to do is I’m gonna take my red, my cardinal red, my white and my black as well. Let’s just go up to our layers. We’ll make a new layer. I’m gonna hit command X select layer seven or we can call. This will just call it colors for at command. F pastes it in front, and we’re going to turn those off real quick now. We’re gonna hit command. Y which is our outline preview. And you can see there’s. All kinds of things going on here that we just do not want there. Sit command! Why we’re gonna kind of toggle this on and off and you can see where there’s just stuff that we? If we were to say, for instance, let’s just go ahead and wait command. Y again to get back to our normal preview. We select this this yellow. Let’s just pull it aside, and we assigned us a color. Because at the moment, it’s got a little bit of a question. Mark, so lets. Just say we made it that red. You can see that we filled all this stuff in that. We don’t necessarily want so. I’m gonna hit Command Z just to undo and turn my colors off. Let’s see if we can just grab this yellow without the rest of that junk in there, so I’m gonna select the yellow again Select same fill color and let’s see if it doesn’t grab everything else that was within this piece of art. That’s not part of the yellow. I’m gonna hit command. Oh, just 2 or 0 just to kind of get the overall view and that accidentally hit some so that way. I do selected it, but let’s do the same thing. Fill color, OK? So now we have just our yellow selected. Finally, we’re gonna command X, and then I’m gonna hit command a now. We have the rest of that that we don’t need, and we can finally get rid of it. I’m gonna hit command F to paste it in front and then we’re gonna go down to our Pathfinder and we’re just going to unite that. So that way we have one shape. Now we can finally go ahead, and if you see here, there’s no question Mark when go ahead and hit our new Swatch and we’ll call this yellow spot and just for demonstration sake. I’ll just keep it yellow and hit. OK, you see what it says? The name cannot be used for a spot color because it was reserved for process plates. So we’re gonna hit. OK, so we’ll call it yellow spot or you can call it. Whatever you want, golden yellow, it actually is kind of a golden yellow, so let’s just call it golden yellow. So that’s what we’ll end up using on the press anyways, and we will make sure and maybe bad. We want to make sure that it’s selected a spot color. We’re gonna hit. Okay, so there we go. We have that all we’re not completely finished, but we finally are getting to a point towards where we can now make our white underbase and with our white underbase. I’m just going to take my my yellow again with our black and our cardinal red because it is darker than actual color of the shirt. We really just will need to make the under base for the yellow and then the white. So I’m gonna select those two and tell you what let’s do this. I’m gonna hit command a that way. I select all of them. Select my art layer command F just to paste it in place and then let’s drag down the colors layer and we’ll just make this our white base layer. You can even do this all in the same layer as long as you move the the white base behind everything. This just kind of makes it a little easier if you guys are new to separating your own artwork, so I’m gonna hit command a. I’m gonna copy that, and then I’m going to turn off my art layer and then go down to my white base layer command F so that way we’re pasting it in the same place, and I’m gonna get rid of the colors. I don’t need to back up with the white base, so I’m gonna delete this black, and then I’m going to delete the cardinal red. And so these are the two colors were left with that. We need to do a white base with the first thing. I’m going to do the easiest thing is my white because I can practically just take this wide and we’ll just we’re gonna make a new spot. Color immediately is what we’re gonna do and we’ll just call this white base or you can call it just base if you want to. I’m gonna give it just a little bit more cyan, and I’ll show you why here in a moment. Make sure it is Color type is spot color and we’re gonna hit. OK, and you can see. It’s a little bit darker of a blue and as I mentioned, I’m going to show you guys. Why here, in a moment now next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to take this yellow. We’re going to essentially just assign it that same white base here now. Here’s where the the real magic is going to start happening. I’m gonna go up to my layers. Turn on my art layer. I’ll just turn off my white base for a moment at this point. I do just want to mention that if you guys do not have Adobe Photoshop or illustrator, use our link down in descriptions that way you can get a subscription to it. It’s no different than if you were to go over to Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Comm and purchase you purchase it yourself. Essentially, this will kick a little bit of a commission or a ways that way we can continue to make awesome tutorial videos such as these for you now moving on. I turn my white base off. I’m going to want to put a little bit of a spread on this yellow that way. When you’re on press, and you have your white and you have to have perfect registration if you’re gonna try and not put any kind of spread or choke on your base in this case. I I’m going to do a little bit of a spread on the yellow that way. We’re not losing any of these small details here, and we’re just going to put a little bit of a stroke on the yellow, just enough to kind of spread it out, and we got a little bit of wiggle room with our registration because we all know that screen printing machines presses. Whatever you want to call them aren’t exactly a perfect thing. We’re going to take this yellow and then we’re going to add an outline to it, right, You’re my Swatch palette! I’m going to just put a stroke on it, and I think this might be just a touch too much of a stroke for me. Personally, you can reduce it back just a little bit. I’m going to go with 0.5 although if your press is a little loose, and you’re having a hard time registering things I would suggest going with a one-point, but I’m gonna go with five-point because I feel pretty comfortable with my registration and how the press holds registration. The next thing we are going to do is with our white top here, and then our yellow we’re going to go over to our attributes, and if that’s not showing up, just go to window and then attributes and pull that up, we’re going to click on over print, fill and over print stroke and essentially what over print is with Adobe Illustrator is it allows you to have a white base color such as this and then have the colors directly sitting on top of that, and it will print out those pieces of film rather than completely knocking it out, so if you didn’t have over print selected, your white base would not print where the yellow and the white is now the next thing we can do just to kind of verify that everything’s cool is we’re gonna go over to our separations preview palette here or window, same thing window separations preview you can click over print preview, and now if we zoom in on our yellow, you can see that little bit of spread that we do have going on within our attributes. We don’t have over print selected. It’s just going to knock that yellow out rather than the the black over printing on top of that yellow, so those will have to be butted up pretty nicely and you’re not going to get any kind of blurring with those edges so that the black is gonna be nice and crisp right up next to that yellow and how we would end up printing. This is we may do the black just right after a white base, but you will see once we we get on press how this ends up working out or you can see just exactly how we’ve got a little bit of a spread here. We got our over print going on and then with our white we’re pretty much just kind of printing that white right on on top of the white because we don’t really need to choke it back any if you’re having a little bit of an issue with doing two separate whites because that’s how we prefer to do things, even if it’s just a one color thing a lot of times, we’ll have a white underbase ins and a white top and sometimes with your your white top, what you can do, It’s just put a little bit of a white stroke on it, and then just really make that a pretty fine white stroke, and it’ll give you a little bit more wiggle room, but in this case. I’m not too worried about it, so we’re just gonna leave it just as it is here, and that is pretty much it aside from. We’re just going to hit command. P we’re gonna send it to our Epson 1430 One of the things you do want to keep an eye out For is we have 1319 selected going to our accurate, accurate to our Epson 1430 and then in our output. You definitely want to make sure that separations are selected. And when you go to print your separations that the only thing that is going to print are the spot colors that you have assigned in this case, we have five colors. We have our process black, our cardinal red or golden yellow, our white base and our white top and we’ll end up printing this with our white base, more likely our black, then our cardinal red or yellow and then our white top. We’ll see once we get everything all set up. So at this point, we are ready to go ahead and print our film and just as a real quick tip. If you do have some colors sitting here in the process, Cyan, Magenta or yellow say, for instance. I’m just going to do an example and let’s make this color here. Well, we’ll, just make a new color and we’ll make sure there’s no black in there and we have some other colors going on well. Make sure that we got some of those. Cmyk colors going on now. If we go to our over print preview if we turn CMYK off, looks like I probably still have. Okay so that let me switch that out. Get rid of this actual spot color that I had assigned to it. Okay, So now back to the example, I turn on my my CMYK. You can see that here’s my colors that I’ve just created and turn on your over print preview. You can turn off all your all your spot colors, and it will kind of show you where your you have something that doesn’t have a spot color sign as I gradually turn all these things off. You see everything starting to disappear, and we still see the Cyan and Magenta, even if I turn to cyan off my cyan is gone budget. Magenta is gone and my yellow. So this will actually let allow you to go back and assign this. Some sort a spot color and you can sculpt your swatches and let’s say this needed to be black. We just hit black. You have to excuse me that that’s on the stroke, but let me click my fill. We hit black and now it disappeared because we have our black turned off. I turn my black on there. It is right there, the film. I’m using for this project is a pretty inexpensive film. That’s about fifty cents each. I’ll leave a link down in the description where you guys can find this. We’re going to burn These screens, set everything up on press and then show you how this all comes out. The screens that were using for this job are 230 mesh screens for the colors, and then that’s even including the white top for the under base we’re going to use a 195 mesh, just like so, and the emulsion we’re using for the 230 mesh is a TZ emulsion and for the white base were using Yalena orange, and I’ll leave a link down to that, and I’ll leave a link down into the kidney ill. Leave a link down in the description where you can find the emulsion that we are using right here. We are on press. It’s hot outside. We are on what is probably the. I know it’s well over 200 shirts. I’ll show you so here. Are the shirts that we are running off? There’s a another case down here. Ready to go, but what? I’m going to show you is. How well this separation method works? I’m going to show you what it looks like on. Press, alright? So here’s how the print is looking. We got our white base flattening screen. Then we’re doing our cardinal red. Here is our yellow. We are flashing. After the yellow, just nice and sharp, then we’re doing our black and our white right after the black go ahead and hit the foot, though, So here is a close-up of how the print is looking. A white spot on along with our black registration. Those two are being printed, wet on wet and the edges are nice and crisp. You can kind of see our spread a little bit on the yellow. However, what you mainly see is what it’s being backed up by though the white base Nice looking pretty awesome. Here’s another close-up off of the press. You can see just how smooth that white base is using that flattening screen. I’ll type the the registration is There’s not a whole lot of learning going on where we’re printing. Our colors wet on wet with a white. With our cardinal, we are over printing the yellow on top of that, but you can still see the Cardinal through it again here. You can see just that little bit of spread right there, and it just kind of helps trap everything. So that way you don’t have to. You got a little bit of wiggle room when it comes to your registration and also for any kind of tolerances on your press where it might shift from pallet the pallet. Thanks for tuning in. I really appreciate it. I hope this was educational. Helpful for you guys. I hope it kind of helps you along the way in separating your artwork, Be sure to check out our next video coming up how to separate a job in Adobe Photoshop. And that way, you can get your screen print on and well. See you guys next time.