I have a few papers to write, which in reality means that I’m going to be doing all of the other work that I need to do and haven’t done. Cleaning, organizing, baking (which I do all the time, anyway), making personal art, and of course, writing on this blog. Anyway, I figured I would share the little Photoshop CMYK separation method I figured out the other day.

I was taught to do separations like this:

1. Flatten the image you want to separate, making sure that it is in CMYK mode.
2. In the Channels window, click the little menu button and select Split Channels

3. You will now be able to edit all of our channels separately. This is when you adjust Levels, Curves, and convert your image to bitmap / halftone your image if you’ll be outputting films for print purposes.
4. Before printing, make sure to select the registration marks, labels and any other printing marks that you’ll need.

As we were getting ready to make our films for our photos plates, we realized that the above method does not print the color bars that appear on the side of the image. These bars are necessary for monitoring the ink film when printing a CMYK image. So, being the obsessive problem solver, I played around in Photoshop until I found the following method (which is probably the correct method that I should have been using all along):

1. Flatten your image & make sure it is in CMYK mode.
2. In the Channels window, deselect the channels you do not want to print, leaving only one channel visible.
3. Select Print from the File menu.
4. Click the Screen button. A dialog box will open – plug in your frequency & angles.

5. Select your printing marks and print!
6. Repeat steps 2 & 3 to print the remain channels. If you entered the frequency and angles for all four channels the first time, Photoshop should retain this info. Doesn’t hurt to check though!

This is probably common knowledge to a lot of people out there, but I had no idea there were multiple ways of making CMYK separations and that I had been doing something more complex than I needed to.

I should get to writing my paper, which, ironically, is about technology and printmaking.