A Digital Printing Network
Printing halftones on the VS420
Okay, we're back to printing more screen positive films for our screenprinter. The art will be one color with a graduated fill from black to white on it, so we will need to print halftones in order for this effect to actually work with one screen. Last year we found a media by Intellicoat that works for printing films, and we've been successful in printing films with a 2 times overprint on CSC as the media choice in Versaworks.
Here's the new problem. Versaworks has the ability to print halftones, but it's greyed out for most media choices. So, we've attempted to create a new media to enable us to use the halftones feature. We went into the Media Explorer and created a new media, based on Generic Vinyl 3. We unchecked "hide non-recommended modes" so we could access the ability to use the halftones feature in this media. The only resolutions we could access this feature in was 1440x1440 dpi and 720x720 dpi. By unchecking the box, we could see those print quality modes available. We hid (with the eyeballs) the resolutions that wouldn't allow us to use halftones and focused on the resolutions that allowed halftones. The problem is that we can still only access the halftone options when we choose CMYK ink, and there's nothing that we can pick that work with our CMYKLcLmMW ink.
When I choose CMYK ink, I can get to the Halftone options, and set the frequency at 54, and a round dot, and the angles are set okay, but I can't change them for the inks in my VS.
Since I can't seem to be able to figure out how to export the file from Corel with halftones, and someone had told me that our Versaworks RIP would print the halftones and I can't seem to do that, I'm kind of stuck. Does anyone have any idea as to how I can get the halftones feature active to print films out on my VS? Intellicoat seems to only have icc profiles for the Roland VP series printers, and VersaWorks won't allow us to import them since we have only the VS.
I need some thoughts, and creative thinking outside the box. Thanks!!!!
Tags: Intellicoat, KK, SCF-7, films, halftones, profiles, screenprinting, versaworks
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Carolyn Klages on -
Steve,
Thanks for calling to try to help work on this problem. Just to keep everyone in the loop on the thought strategy, we're going to try to create a new profile from the Generic Vinyl profile, and under the calibration settings in Fine Tune and Apply, we'll adjust the shape of the curves of each color channel, and we'll change the "set ink limits' starting with the settings from the CSC profile that allowed us to print our regular print postive films. This will allow us to try printing with the halftone feature that's only available in VW in CMYK mode and with 1440x1440 or 720x720 resolution modes. Steve indicates that even though we have the CMYKLcLmWM ink set, that we can use that CMYK choice in the Generic Vinyl profile, as the machine knows that it will only pull from the appropriate color cartridge. Whew! I was worried that it would pull metallic into the black, but that makes me feel a lot better. :-) We'll keep you posted. Anyone who has anything to add, please feel free to chime in. We're forging relatively new ground here, and welcome your thoughts, especially those that do screenprinting and have experience with films. Thanks!!!
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Permalink Reply by Dana Curtis on -
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Permalink Reply by CYW on -
Carolyn, I've been doing art/color seps for screen printers since (omg) 1978
Currently I'm printing my halftones from Corel through Ghostscript (RIP) but we've also used a boatload of PS printers over the years
I must have missed why you want to go through all this fussing with trying to print through VW?
I'm jealous
Must be nice having the extra time to play.......sigh
Diane
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Permalink Reply by Carolyn Klages on
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Hi, Diane. It's not that I have the extra time to play (I really wish that I did). We are incredibly busy with work orders. The reasoning behind trying to print films from our VersaCamm is this. We have art that we create for various media here (embroidery, twill, chenille, heat transfers, print, vinyl, etc, etc). We do not screenprint, though, and send our stuff to a local screenprinter (we do all their embroider, etc). Since we have the ability to print films with our VersaCamm, it makes it sense to be able to print the films for some of the art that we'll need to have screenprinted, and give the films with the box of shirts to the printer with a production sheet, and then we know it will be done exactly right, no matter who on their staff runs them. Our screenprinter agrees that if we printed the films, it would be much faster and more accurate for her, since she has different people printing the films to burn the screens. Sometimes it's done well, sometimes it's done just okay, and sometimes they're excellent. While they all do the job, it's not always as we expect it to look, and if we can print the films, we have a better idea of how the screens will really be burned before they go through the expense of charging us for screens that don't do the most excellent rendition. It's much less expensive for us to print them rather than to pay for them to print them, we have better control over the art (for example, they sometimes have problems with exporting QR codes to films for some unknown reason), and we own the films in case something in this economy makes them let go of their biz. We don't want to invest in a dedicated printer just for doing films and take up the space in our shop for it, as we don't do a whole ton of them...it's not the focus of our business...and why invest in a new dedicated films printer when our VersaCamm can do the job just as well. Once we get the parameters, etc set up, it shouldn't be any more difficult than printing decals. The difficulty comes in that I'm not a screenprinter, and the concept of getting the halftones printed is new to me and I have a big learning curve.
If you don't mind, tell me more about the Ghostscript RIP. Can we use that in conjunction with the VersaCamm with our Corel files? Thanks!
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Permalink Reply by CYW on
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Carolyn, I'm really of no help when it comes to printing halftones from our VC's
I never tried it and probably never will.
I do all my sep work, all my lpi and angles in Corel, print to file and then take that file into Ghostscript/Ghostview to print
I don't think Ghostscript would help, since you intend on using Versaworks for your RIP
Most of my screeners don't regularly do high volume 4CP work so the system works very well for us
What kind of press does your screenprinter have?
I'm surprised that they would request 55 lpi ......are they using an auto?
So how are you handling seps without halftones?
How are you bringing those files into VW and how are you holding registration?
Are you doing the seps manually?
Are you using separate files?
Very interesting subject matter for me.......but honestly it hurts my brain thinking about it and thinking about all the hoops you may need to go through.
Also, I know our inks costs are minimal, how about the film? I think it costs me about $1 for a 13x19 waterproof sheet
Is it less expensive for our wide format printers?
Yep, very interesting
Sorry I can't really help
Diane
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