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I’ve been doing some DIY plate processing and getting okay results. I’m wondering if I can create halftones in polymer at home? with any kind of consistency? Can I make a true halftone on my computer? What settings, etc…
If anyone can shed some light, it will be greatly appriciated.
Thanks.
What kind of printer do you have? Does it support Postscript? You could always make a bitmapped image in Photoshop… with some experimentation you’d get excellent results.
The density of film from your service provider is important in photopolymer platemaking I’m sure your of aware of this fact.
I tell my service provider to output the halftone at the screen I need, sometimes it’s 35, 65, or 100 lie screen.
I’ve had luck in photoshop with filters but not the success from my film service provider.
Serichrome Separations here in Dallas, TX is excellent with reasonable prices. http://www.serichrome.com/index.html
Casey McGarr
Inky Lips Press
Thomas- YES you can create PP halftones yourself. I’ve done quite a few of them recently using traditional halftone negatives, solar exposure and hand processing. However, this is quite a bit more tricky than doing text, and you should be prepared for a higher failure rate.
The real problem is in getting any sort of consistency in the threshold highlight and dark shadow dots. These are rather sensitive to plate exposure times.
As far as using a computer to generate your halftone negatives, I’ve not had a lot of success with it. I’ve used several different programs (Corel Draw, Adobe, and others) with a high quality laser printer, and have not been able to get consistent densities. If you have better success at this, please let us know how you did it.
Thanks everyone. I have noticed that the halftone filter in Illustrator(one of them, see attached) creates a more true halftone. You also have control of dot radius and screen angles.
I’ve just been printing transparencies on a old cheap laser printer. Problem is I usually double them up, with a half tone this is near impossible and seems to cause more problems than its worth.
I’ll play around with it for awhile and see what happens.
I’ll let you know how it goes. Thanks again.
Sincerely,
TRK
Picture-1.jpg
If you can print on a nice COLOR laser printer you can try printing in rich black—100% of all 4 process colors—to achieve more density in the output.