Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So this morning Ryan had me run a test of some of the commercially available silkscreening software. To sum up my reviews, it's horrible. Just cheap Photoshop actions that can't actually do anything that a reasonably skilled Photoshop user couldn't do anyway. So I dusted off my old prototype screening software and took another look at it.

My software is optimized for one thing: taking full color input images, and producing multi-ink screens for extremely limited amounts of colors, in order to try and create a close representation using as few inks as possible. For example, in the image below, I chose red, white, and a pale blue, and asked it to screen the image onto a black shirt. I've included the screens, as well as the original and output images:

As you can see, some of the tones change very slightly, but on the whole it does a remarkable job. In the sample below, I've screen a different image onto an orange shirt, using white, blue, and black ink only — the software is able to cleanly integrate the shirt's tone into the image.

I have an endless stream of products I really should release commercially… This one just needs some tweaking and an interface and it would be ready to go.

The above software took an afternoon to write. Any reasonably skilled programmer could do the same (I'd never claim to be anything but a “reasonably skilled” programmer… there are certainly hundreds of people on IAM that are better) — it always amazes me what a lack of decent tools there is. I believe that it's due to the larger phenomena of how when people become engaged in a task, they lose the ability to see their goal. Because they see only their task, not their goal, they veer off course and act self-destructively.