Finally got a chance to post a tutorial on how to properly separate your colors for print.  Keep in mind that every print shop handles color separation in a different manner.  In the following tutorial, I will demonstrate how we do it here at The Alexa Machine Company, using Photoshop CS3 to color separate artwork for Captain Greedi’s Swim Good Tee.

1. John from Captain Greedi used our 13×16 Standard Print Template to place his artwork file, a great way to make sure your artwork fits within our printing bounds.  He placed his artwork in the Your Artwork Here layer and used the Tshirt Color swatches to pick his tshirt background color of black.

To start off, we’re first gonna “hide” the Artwork Bounds layer so that it is not disturbing while we work.

Artwork placed inside our Standard Printing Template

2. Second, since John’s artwork has two total print colors, we’re going to create a duplicate layer of the artwork.  At this point, we’re also going to label each layer their respective colors.  Later on we will assign them actual pantone color codes.

Creating a duplicate layer and naming layers their respective colors.

3. Now we’ll select our first layer, in this case the Yellow/Gold layer, and using the Wand tool (with Contiguous unchecked) we’re gonna select a yellow part of the artwork.  For solid spot colors like the example designs, a tolerance of 60%-100% will generally work well to capture all the parts of the artwork that are, in this case, yellow.  If you have two colors that are pretty close, like let’s say a gold/yellow and a mustard/yellow, you’ll want to decrease the tolerance level to below 50% to make sure that photoshop doesn’t clump both colors in the same selection path.

Selecting first layer to color separate.

When selected with the wand tool set to 70%.

4.What you want to get rid of is all the color information that is not in the selection path encompassed around our yellow, so we invert the selection path (cmmnd+shft+i on mac) so that everything that isn’t yellow on our artboard is selected, and we simply hit the delete button.  What we are left with is a layer that only contains yellow color info.

5.  We’re going to repeat the process on the blue layer so that we are left with the example below.

6.  At this point, we’re basically done.  We just need to decide on a pantone color to match our ink to and name the layer that.  John did not want this artwork printed with a white base, which on a dark garment, will keep the shirt color from bleeding through the ink color.  By not printing a white base we 1)are able to make each print nice and thin, and 2)each print comes out with a “vintage” feel to it.  Many colors are not as vibrant when printed on a dark garment with no white base coat thus the “vintage” feel.  To print vibrant colors on dark garments, we have to print a white base underneath all colors.  It’s like putting a white primer on your wall before applying a new color to your wall.  Even though John did not request a white base coat, I’m going to show you how we create our white base layers.

7. We’re first going to select all the layers that make up the full artwork, in this case both our yellow and our blue layers, by holding down the shift key while selection our two layers in the layer box.  Next, we duplicate and combine our two layers into one.  Name this layer White Base, and move it down below all the other layers like in the example below.

8.  Using either the Paint Bucket tool, or layer options, we’ll color our White Base layer white.  At this point we need to decrease our white base by 2 pixels.  We do this by right clicking on the White Base layer icon and clicking on Select Pixels, creating a selection path around our White Base layer.  Next we go to Select>Modify>Contract and insert a 2 in the option box.  This will feather, or decrease the selection path by 2 pixels.  Again, we invert the selection path by typing shift+cmmnd+i and hit delete.  The reason we do this is because we have to make sure that the colors being printed on top completely cover the white area and by reducing the white base by 2 pixels we make sure there is a slight, yet unnoticeable, overlap.

9. Last thing that is left is to name our layers the appropriate pantone colors and to save our work. This artwork has finally been separated and is ready to have the films printed straight from the file.