Printing halftones from Acrobat for shooting on camera

sauce

Member
Hello. I am looking for a way, using Acrobat CS3, to output screens on a postscript printer so I can give it to my pressman to shoot on his camera. We are trying to avoid shelling out money for new CTP hardware. Is there any cheaper solution?

Please let me know if you suggest any additional software, plugins, etc. Anything cheaper than a CTP system. I already have: a few postscript office laserjets, Adobe CS3, PitStop, and the camera is an Itek 617s
 
Re: Printing halftones from Acrobat for shooting on camera

Sure, just print separations to the printer. Quality will suffer but it's doable.

Don't know about your camera though. You would just have to try it and see.
 
Re: Printing halftones from Acrobat for shooting on camera

My office printers do not print halftones that are good for the camera. They need to be dotted first.
 
Re: Printing halftones from Acrobat for shooting on camera

If you have a postscript laser printer you should be able to print "screened" separations.
 
Re: Printing halftones from Acrobat for shooting on camera

First off, what printer is it and what do you have set for settings both in acrobat and for the printer itself.

I do it all the time form an HP Laserjet 4MV/MP . I usually print from Indesign though. I always print as separations. I have to set the grayscale enhancement to standard and the resolution to dark. The best screen we can get and have the platemaker shoot is 85 line @ 600 dpi.

printing separations will be your first step. The adobe products will not do real halftones when printing as composite. In acrobat it's going to be under teh advanced settings in the print dialog.

Edited by: Lammy on Apr 25, 2008 2:43 PM
 
Re: Printing halftones from Acrobat for shooting on camera

If your office printer doesn't do appropriate halftones, you could open the files in PhotoShop, separate them if they're in color, then apply a halftone by doing a mode change to bitmap on each channel, then output the individual screened bitmap channels on your printer. It will take some experimentation to get everything right but it's doable. Shooting halftone art printed off an office printer can work for black and white images for, for example, newspaper work. But I think you'll find that with four color you'll have way too many issues related to screen angle moiré, fit, and registration.
For black and white work, if you can, image that art at 200% with an lpi of half of what you want. Then shoot the art at 50% to get to final size. E.g. for a 100 lpi final halftone screen at a final size of 4" you'd screen and print it at 50 lpi at 8". This will help get you enough gray levels and a better quality halftone dot.

good luck, gordo
 
Re: Printing halftones from Acrobat for shooting on camera

Gordon, in an emergency I have done that. I would rather keep Photoshop out of the equation though.

Lammy, I have Canon machines with Fiery RIPs. Would you mind going a little more in depth, step by step as to what I need to do? I think I understand what you are saying, under the "Advanced Print Setup" dialog where you print seps there is a place to define lpi and angle? I've played with this before and I was able to get small results only on an M3 controller hooked up to a b/w printer. By small results I mean I was able to print dotted output but I did not have enough control to make the dots bigger/smaller to make the image sharp, but it was close to what I wanted. Is this a hardware limitation? Since we are using the same Adobe software to do it?
 
Re: Printing halftones from Acrobat for shooting on camera

Have you looked at all into imaging film? You might be able to pick up an old capstan imagesetter (like the Agfa Accuset or Lino 330) for cheap. Also wondering, you're looking to go cheaper than a CTP system, but have you looked into the little Xanté desktop platesetters?

rich
 

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