Color Separation: Professional Method vs. Online Process

Color Separation is a basic process when it comes to Screen Printing (textile and other format printing) and requires a critical eye to achieve the highest fidelity of the printed graphic with the original design.

At Pixel’s Hive we love what we do and we’re always researching and looking for new techniques to continue to stand out competitively.

This is how we discovered there are many pages dedicated to make the color separation online. We know exactly what our customers need, so we decided to test them.

The first reaction we had was the delay time, although the online process took several minutes for graphics of few colors, in the traditional method we’ve created a series of automations with which we get the same resolution in less time.

Not all the graphics we work with look the same, and it’s at this point that it is good to have designers who are able to retouch the image to give it the quality that is needed for optimum printing (ideal size and resolution for printing, cleaning and focusing on low quality images); an aspect that many of these online separation sites don’t count..

But without a doubt, the most important point where we stopped was in the image quality. In Pixel’s Hive we consider quality above all things and the result obtained in these tests was not what we expected.

Being an automatic process, these sites separate all the graphs equally using the same method without stopping to think about how they are going to be printed and in which process it adapts better to the complexity of the image.

In our example we can notice errors in the image and poor quality in the combination of colors that create a blurred and stained image. When processing the image without having made the necessary corrections then it is not the right size or the ideal resolution to be printed.