Screen Printing Color Separation
Split a picture into the inks it prints with (two to eight spot colours) and download each layer as a black film positive or a colour layer. Nothing is uploaded.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Split a picture into the inks it prints with (two to eight spot colours) and download each layer as a black film positive or a colour layer. Nothing is uploaded.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Drop a design or a photo, choose how many inks you will print with, and the page separates the image into that many spot colour layers. Every pixel is assigned to exactly one ink, so the layers never overlap and never leave holes: what you see in the preview is the picture as it will print, and the layer list on the right shows each ink with its colour and the share of the print it covers. Hide an ink to see the print without it, or click its swatch to change the colour, which is how you match a design to the Pantone or plastisol inks you actually have on the shelf. Smooth removes speckle before the separation so small noisy areas do not become stray dots on a screen. Call it a color separator, a colour splitting tool or a screen print color separation generator - it does the job of the separation software, in the browser, without a service or a subscription.
Download gives you the layers a printer needs. Film positives are the standard: one PNG per ink with the ink area in solid black on a transparent background, at the full size of the original, ready to print on film or transparency and burn onto a screen. Colour layers are the same separations in their ink colours, for mock-ups, client approval or a quick check of registration. Both come as a ZIP that also holds the combined preview; the combined picture on its own is the third choice in the download menu. The lightest colour is treated as the paper or the shirt by default, so it is left out of the films; switch that off when the lightest colour is an ink too, for example a white underbase on a dark garment.
The inks are found by clustering the colours in the image (k-means), then every pixel is given to the nearest ink. That is spot colour separation, the kind used for logos, illustrations, posters and most garment printing, as opposed to four-colour process separation, which simulates every colour with CMYK halftones. Photographs work too, and turn into the posterised, silk-screen look; two to four inks give the classic poster style, six to eight keep more of the tones. The separation is repeatable: the same image and settings always give the same inks, so you can come back and re-export.
The image, the clustering and the ZIP are all produced in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server, which matters for client artwork that has not been released yet.
As many screens as you are willing to burn and register. Two or three inks suit logos and bold illustrations; four to six cover most posters and photos in a poster style; eight is the maximum here. Watch the coverage figures: an ink under a few percent may not be worth its own screen, so reduce the count and let those pixels merge into a neighbour.
A black-on-clear print of one ink's area, used to expose a photosensitive emulsion on a screen. The black blocks the light, so that area washes out and becomes the open mesh the ink passes through. The films here are full-size PNGs with transparency; print them at 100% on film or transparency sheets.
Because it is treated as the paper. Most designs are printed on white or coloured stock, and the lightest area is where no ink goes. Turn off "Lightest colour is the paper" to get a film for it as well.
No. This page produces spot colour separations, one solid layer per ink. Process separation into cyan, magenta, yellow and black halftones is a different job and needs halftone screening at the right angles and line counts.
No. The separation runs entirely in your browser and the files are written on your own device.