Screen Print Color Separations

Screen printing lays down one ink at a time, each through its own mesh stencil — its own screen. A four-color design needs four screens, and before anything reaches the press the artwork has to be split into those individual ink layers. That split is called color separation, and the broader prep work — separating, trapping, and adding alignment marks — is prepress.

This tool reduces your design to a small set of spot colors, then renders each color as its own opaque plate on a transparent background. Two extras make the output press-ready rather than just pretty. Trapping grows each plate outward by a few pixels so neighboring inks overlap; when the press drifts slightly out of registration, the colors still meet instead of leaving a bare-substrate gap. Registration marks — crosshair targets in each corner and the center — are stamped identically onto every screen so the operator can mechanically line up all the plates.

If your artwork has gradients or photographic shading, convert it to clean line work with Vectorize Studio first, or break tone into printable dots with the Halftone Generator before you separate. For Pantone TCX names per channel and TIFF or PSD export, the full Separation Studio goes deeper.