Hey yall. Finally got a minute to get back into this thing. I'm prepping to go on vacation next week. (Lake Powell 5 days!) so I've been very busy trying to clean my plate.
Let's recap:
Me: I'm trying to learn some new techniques so I can do shirts like the high end dudes.
You guys: so
Now.....here's the latest.
The technique involves drawing in Illustrator or getting a tracing utility like streamline to convert your bitmap to vector then bouncing it over to PS and coloring in channels so your separations get completed as you render. For any of you T-shirt guys out there this is very very cool. Saving time increases your profit margin. Increased profit margin makes significant other more tolerant of your need to put a flip face MD player in your 1958 VW.
Here's 1:
You can see how I set up the channels and what's goin on here. Each channel represents a color in the design. The channels are set at 5% opacity so you can see how they blend. (except black and white which are 100%) When the channels are output to film the rip (printer thing) will make everything black but render tones less than black in whatever halftone or diffussion dither I specify.) That means it makes it look swell.
here's 2:
I turned off all the black line so you could see the color on it's own. I'm not even done with color number 2 yet and chances are I'll scrap all of this and start from scratch after I get it down. When you make your selections in the channels expand then by 2 pixels. This will compensate for the black line and butt your colors against each other. Your printer may get a little fussy if he's old school, but the new gen will dig you.
here's 3:
Just a closer look at the wheel. Personally I'm not real happy with it, but mistakes are part of growing. You can employ PS effects in the normal layer mode and then bring them into your channel. This is a very cool thing. That's how I did the tire.
Like I said this is probably all for scrap but the learning process is invaluable. I have to thank Jeri Clow for all her help. She's been great.
http://www.motorsportsillustrated.com
-Lemorris