The intricacies are actually kind of interesting. Seriously, given an input color at a specific pixel location, and a list of inks and a base shirt color, how much of each ink do you need to screen, and in what order, to match it as closely as possible? Keep in mind that we're not talking about CMYK mixing which any idiot can do in their sleep. It might be two blue inks and a red ink on a black shirt. Added to that, the inks are opaque, making order very important. Added to THAT, silk screening is somewhat inaccurate and you have to take into account that because of the opaque overlaps, different levels of saturation will effectively have different levels of artificial transparency (because a high saturation will obscure more even if it's not properly aligned). I can think of the way to do this slowly ink picking through a trial-and-error process, sped up by a look-up table, but if there are any bright people out there that can tell me a quick algorythm, I'd love to hear it. I've gotten as far as thinking about it a lot and defining all the parameters, and writing the routines for doing the basics like reading and writing TGA files (a wonderfully simple image format).
Post a Comment