Colour Separation?

insinkerator

My dad got an image from a customer, and asked me do I know of a program that will do colour separation on it.

I hadn't a clue what he meant by that, but after some explanation, what he wants is a program that will take an regular photograph with toned colours etc, and break it down so the photo is made up of just its 4 primary colours. If that makes any sense?

Can anyone help me on this? Thanks in advance!

Fogra

I don't understand why he wants you to do that but you basically need to open the file in Adobe Photoshop and convert it to CMYK if it's not that colour mode already. The 4 separations can then be printed. The converted image can also be brought into InDesign, Illustrator or Quark and separations can be printed from there.

ztoical

If your taking about doing CMYK colour separation you can do that with Photoshop. It's fairly straight forward. Open the image in photoshop, if it's RGB change it to CMYK and open your channels so you can select each of the CMYK layers individually for printing.

insinkerator

Yeah, when he asked me first, I did a quick search on Google, and I came up with what you guys are saying. I showed it to him and he says thats not it.

If i was to give an example of what he wants. If you were to take this picture

And do what he wants done, then instead of having all the different shades of red on the car, the car would become one red block. The red being the same shade throughout. And that style would be repeated for the entire photograph.
I don't know if that is called colour seperation or not, i'm only saying colour seperation because that's what he called it.

ztoical

What exactly is it he wants it for? There are different ways to do what you are asking but it really depends on what it's for.

insinkerator

Its for printing on to a transfer for firing on to pottery.

ztoical

insinkerator wrote: »

Its for printing on to a transfer for firing on to pottery.

You need to make decals of the photo by silkscreening the image with ceramic glaze onto decal paper then soak them in water and slip it off the paper onto the pottery. CMYK is no good for ceramics or so I've been told by ceramic artists in the past, you will need to go with Spot colours using something like adobe separator which comes with Illustrator. There are alot of constraints with ceramics [Half tones for ceramics are different to paper, they tend to be much coarser for example] Is your father ceramic artist or a printer who a ceramic artist has asked to produced separations? It would be best really to check with a ceramic artist whose done this type of work.

5uspect

Did he mean colour segmentation?



It's used a lot in machine vision for identifying and measuring objects. There are a few ways to achieve the effect such as posterising in Photoshop or using the Live Trace feature in Illustrator.

Kenny Logins

How complex is the image? It sounds like he wants it traced -

http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/illustrator-tutorials/adobe-illustrator-tip-1-intro-and-livetrace/

insinkerator

ztoical wrote: »

You need to make decals of the photo by silkscreening the image with ceramic glaze onto decal paper then soak them in water and slip it off the paper onto the pottery. CMYK is no good for ceramics or so I've been told by ceramic artists in the past, you will need to go with Spot colours using something like adobe separator which comes with Illustrator. There are alot of constraints with ceramics [Half tones for ceramics are different to paper, they tend to be much coarser for example] Is your father ceramic artist or a printer who a ceramic artist has asked to produced separations? It would be best really to check with a ceramic artist whose done this type of work.

We have a big printer in our workshop that allows us to print full colour transfers with covercoat and all that jazz, so that all we need to do when its done is to cut off the excess paper, put on the transfer, and its ready to fire in the kiln. Normally, for a small job, we are just asked for a photograph to be fired on, and the customer provides the photograpgh/image.

This time the customer has sent us on the image, but has asked for this thing my father calls colour seperation. His way of explaining this is:

"A photo is made up of so many primary colours, and then different shades and tones are used to give the photo its quality. What I want to do is remove all these shades and tones, so instead of having a panel of dark red and light red, it will just be a panel of one uniform red."

The photo in question is a motorbike iirc. I can check later.

5uspect wrote: »

Did he mean colour segmentation?

Kenny Logins wrote: »

How complex is the image? It sounds like he wants it traced -

http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/illustrator-tutorials/adobe-illustrator-tip-1-intro-and-livetrace/

Thanks for the help, neither of these resemble what he is looking for. He showed me an example of a transfer he printed, where he paid someone else for the picture to be "separated", and its a bit different, although the tracing is close. I'll get a picture of the plate he showed me this evening.

Kenny Logins

Those examples aren't great, I admit.

Something like this?

http://www.joke-art.com/car-vectors.html

but with less colours, giving an almost cartoon-like appearance?