Need to make halftone screen of bitmap earth for big project

[Zwaeback]

Any help would be much appreciated.

I have a bitmap image of earth that i need to print in a halftone screen. could i do this with xara....(or really any piece of software) its part of a larger image being screen printed on t-shirts and printed on mugs. preparing halftone screens is a new experience for me. i believe that i understand the fundamentals of it....just don't know how to get the machine to print it out.

thanks,
phil
jaeger studios
all action awards
signs by heck

[Zwaeback]

Any help would be much appreciated.

I have a bitmap image of earth that i need to print in a halftone screen. could i do this with xara....(or really any piece of software) its part of a larger image being screen printed on t-shirts and printed on mugs. preparing halftone screens is a new experience for me. i believe that i understand the fundamentals of it....just don't know how to get the machine to print it out.

thanks,
phil
jaeger studios
all action awards
signs by heck

[Sean Sedwards]

The obvious first suggestion is to apply one of the mono colour reduction algorithms via Utilities > Bitmap Effects and Plug-ins > Bitmap Effects > Colour Depth.

Regards - Sean

[gwpriester]

Phil

Halftone screens are part of the photo separation process normally done by a pre-press house (service bureau or printer) and involve creating four separate screens for four color printing (CMYK) or various solid colors for sport color printing.

CMYK screens are rotated at 45 degree angles with exception of yellow which I believe is angled at 15 degrees. The screens are angles to avoid distracting moire patterns that occur with lesser or greater degrees of rotation.

Are you planning to do the screening yourself or have a silk screen printing company do the screening? If the latter, they will convert the art into screens for you.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Early So Humble...

[Mick Robinson]

The Print dialog lets you specify the screen frequency:
Bring up the Print dialog.
Click "Options".
Select the "Separations" tab.
Set "Default screen frequency" to the required value. The person you are preparing the work for should be able to tell you what frequency to use.
As it's for silk screening, you need a fairly coarse screen, no more than 100 lpi.

[Zwaeback]

Thank you much for the replies,

I brought in my grayscale image (it only needs to be one color)into xara, then chose to color separate it. i only printed the black separation. it printed it, but at 360 dpi. i hope to be able to print with much larger dots than that. the screen frequency was set at 60, when i did the print. i tried to print on my inkjet. do i need to use a post script printer? ALSO, it is possible to convert the image to screen/ dots before printing it. it seems like there should be a piece of software that does that.

so far when i've had to create any sort of halftone(which is not often)i've created a custom dot or line texture fill in coreldraw. that wouldn't work as well for a more complicated image like the earth image i'm working on.

thanks for your help,
phil

[Sean Sedwards]

You seem to have overlooked my suggestion. Select the bitmap on the page, go to the Colour Depth dialog and select To mono (halftone). Guess what that does!

Regards - Sean

[Zwaeback]

thank you sean,

i think i overlooked your suggestion, because i didn't understand its import. the halftone converter works well. i'll print out the bitmap and see how it looks... the screen can be misleading.

thanks,
phil