|
At Lewisville Lettering we are happy to custom design artwork for our clients, and often you will have designs of your own to be screen printed or embroidered. However, if you are not familiar with the details of our production process, the artwork you bring in may be unsuitable for quality results. The most common obstacle we face in printing and embroidering customer designs is producing COLOR SEPARATIONS from low quality artwork.
The quality of your artwork will make a big difference in the quality of the final product, so we want to help you bring in designs that will yield proper color separations. If you have the appropriate software, please provide us with color separations for your art. If you do not have the proper tools, please make sure your digital files are in one of these file formats: JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BITMAP (.bmp), Adobe Illustrator (.eps or .ai), or Adobe Photoshop (.psd) and at a resolution of 300 PPI or greater. If you bring in a hardcopy, be sure to enalarge it to fill the whole page and print your image at 300 DPI or greater. WHAT ARE COLOR SEPARATIONS? In the process of screen printing and embroidering designs with more than one color, each color has to be isolated and used as a pattern. In screen printing a stencil is made for each color present in a design. In embroidery the machine must know where all areas of a particular color are located. When a multicolor design is divided into its constituent colors, those separate images are called color separations. DIFFERENT IMAGE TYPES Not all images are the same, and not all color separation processes are the same. For our purposes there are two basic categories of images that we separate differently. DISCRETE TONE IMAGES are made up of areas or lines of solid colors. These areas may touch each other, but each area is distinct. CONTINUOUS TONE IMAGES are those which show gradations of color. Although there may be discrete color areas in a continuous tone image, if there are ANY areas where one color gradually changes into another color, then the image as a whole must be treated as a continuous tone image. SEPARATING COLORS There are different ways to separate colors in a discrete tone image. If you are working with vector-based graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, and your image is a vector image (that is, an image made up of mathematically defined geometric shapes), then you can select each part of the image and isolate each color by deleting the other colors. For our purposes we convert each isolated color to black in order to make a template for the screen printing process. For the embroidery process, black color separations are also useful because they make high contrast images that are easily traced. Another way to separate discrete tone images is by using a raster based program (one that is based on pixels rather than mathematic formulas) like Adobe Photoshop. Using a selection tool, each color can be isolated and then saved as a separate file or printed as a separate image. If the discrete tone image is not a vector image, this is probably the simplest way to separate colors in the graphic. Separating continuous tone images is a process that requires some practice, and it can be very difficult to accurately reproduce the original colors and values of the artwork. If you have a continuous tone image to be printed or embroidered, you should provide us with a high resolution digital file or printout of the design. The higher the quality of the original image, the better the results. Sometimes customers provide low resolution images which cannot be properly separated. In such cases we may have to create the image from scratch (and charge an art preparation fee), or we may have to decline the job. |
|
ART SPECIFICATIONS
|
|
Designs on disc should come in one of these file formats:
JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BITMAP (.bmp), Adobe Illustrator (.eps or .ai),
or Adobe Photoshop (.psd). Resolution should be 300 PPI or
greater for best results. Low resolution images from the
Internet will not produce quality work.
Designs on paper should be printed full size or as close to full size as possible. For best results all designs should be printed at 300 DPI or greater. We cannot print copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder. |
|
|
|
GARMENTS CONTACT US DIRECTIONS ABOUT US |