Narration for Bullseye Glass video \"Powder Printing for Photoshop\"
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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Powder printing is a great way to incorporate your own two D artwork, drawings, images and photographs into your kil glass practice to powder print. We must first burn our image onto a silk screen. This will require making a film positive which is essentially a transparency that can be printed from either a laser or ink jet printer. The film positive is used during the screen exposure. This process relies on the imagery being completely black and completely white with no gray tones. This is because the ultraviolet light from the exposure unit hardens the photo sensitive emulsion onto the screen, the black areas of your image shield, the emulsion from the UV light making it possible to rinse away these open areas allow powder to pass through. There are many programs and methods for editing an image into an all black and all white image. We're going to discuss a method known as half tone using Adobe Photoshop half tone is a great choice for photographs that you want to incorporate into your piece without losing much detail. A few things to know before we get started, a half tone image creates the illusion of shades of gray. Between black and white. By using varying sizes of black dots. If you look closely at a newspaper image, you can see the small dots that create the tonal differences. We will be editing an image to powder print on a 135 mesh silk screen. 1 35 refers to the number of threads per inch in the weave of the screen. The dots of our half tone must be large enough to stick to the screen without falling through the mesh. During the developing process, the dot size is determined by the frequency which is how many dots per inch will make up our image. This will come up later. Most likely you already have images on your computer that you would like to use. We're using an image that is 36 10 by 24 09 pixels. This will give us good results. Smaller images may give you poor results, create a folder and name it powder printing. This is where you can put images that you would like to use. Making them easy to find in Photoshop, click the file menu at the top of the left screen and select open, select your powder printing folder and find the image that you'd like to edit, select it and click open. The image will open in Photoshop. Let's save our image right from the beginning and give it a name that will help us find it in the future. Go to file save as a menu will appear type the name of your image. I've chosen to name this image parrot underscore half to in the ware box. Click the arrows on the right locate and click on your powder printing folder in the format box, click the arrows on the right locate and click on Photoshop. Now click save. You will see the name of the image at the top left of your screen. Now that we've saved our image. Let's look at the tool bar to the left of the screen. Many of the icons for the tools look like their real life counterparts. For example, the eraser tool looks like an eraser. The paintbrush tool looks like a paintbrush. If you hover over one of the icons for a couple of seconds, Photoshop will tell you which tool it is our first step will be to size our image according to the size of our project. For this lesson, the dimensions will be five inches by seven inches. We will use the crop tool which looks like a square with tails on either side, click the crop tool at the top of the screen. There are options for how you would like to use this tool. Open the drop down menu and set it to size and resolution. A pop up menu appears set width and height to five and seven inches. Set the resolution to 300 pixels per inch. You have the option to save these settings as a preset to be able to use them. In the future, a crop area will appear over your image. You can click and drag the corners of this area to fine tune what part of your image you would like to use. You can also click and hold inside the crop area to move it around your image. The highlighted area is what will be kept after cropping. Once you have the border of your image where you want it, you can press return or click the checkmark at the top of the screen. This completes your crop action. If at any time during the editing process, your image is too large to fit the display or too small to accurately see what you're doing. Go to the toolbar and double click on the hand. This will maximize the size of your image without going off of the monitor. In order to create a half tone image, we will need to make the original a black and white image. Even if your image already looks black and white. This step is necessary because there may still be color information in the original to do this. We will go to image mode gray scale. You will be asked if you want to discard color information, click discard. Now that we have a black and white image, it might be necessary to adjust the contrast of your image as a general rule images with more contrast tend to read better as half tone prints. There are several ways to do this. We will be discussing how to adjust the contrast with levels go to image adjustments. Levels. A pop-up menu will appear, move the slide bars to make adjustments. Moving the slider on the left, adjusts the dark gray while moving the slider on the right, adjusts the light gray aesthetically, it's nice to have areas of pure white, pure black and gray tones in an image adjustments like this must be made before applying the half tone. After the half tone has been created, there will be no gray tones to adjust, move them back and forth until you're satisfied. Then click. OK. Let's save the work we've done so far. Go to file save at this point. We advise making duplicates of your image. This will allow you to try different editing variations and be able to view them side by side. Once they've been edited multiple ways to do this, go to image duplicate, you will be asked if you want to name it. Parrot underscore half to copy, click. OK? You will see your duplicate on the header at the top of the screen. Let's do one more. Click the header for your original image. This takes you back to the original again, go to image duplicate this time. You will be asked if you want to name it. Parrot underscore half to copy two click. OK? Now we're ready to begin creating the half tone to begin creating the half tone go to image mode bit map. A pop up menu will appear in the box for output type in 5 40 set the unit measurement to pixels per inch. The number 5 40 is generated from multiplying the screen mesh 135 by four. This ensures the best possible resolution for the half tone dots under method. Choose half tone screen and click. OK. In the next pop up menu, you will be asked to type in the frequency again, this refers to how many lines or dots per inch the image will have. There is a maximum frequency that is determined by the thread count of your screen. Divide the screen thread count by 4, 135 divided by four is 33.75 type in 33.75 and select lines per inch. This is the maximum frequency that can be achieved with a 135 mesh screen. Now set the angle anywhere between 45 and 90 degrees. This determines the directionality of the half tone lines. Let's choose an angle of 70. Finally for half to shape, choose ellipse and click. OK. Your half tone image is complete. Let's go over it again with the duplicates we made just before applying the half tone effect. This will give us an opportunity to look at some variations. Click on the header for parrot underscore half to copy this time. Let's change the frequency of our dots but nothing else go to image mode bit map Photoshop will remember all of my settings from my last edit. Keep the output at 540 the method as half tone screen click. OK. On the next menu type in 20 for the frequency keeping the angle 70 degrees and the shape ellipse click. OK? By clicking between the headers at the top of the screen, we can see the difference that a lower frequency makes. Let's go one more time changing only the angle from the second image. Click on the header for parrot underscore half to copy two, go to image mode bitmap, keep the output at 540. And the method as half tone screen click, OK? Keep the frequency at 20 but change the angle to 45 degrees and keep the shape ellipse click. OK? By clicking between our 2nd and 3rd edits, you can see that the angle of the lines is a subtle difference. But one worth noting once you have chosen which variation you like best save it by going to file, save and naming it with two underscore print added to the end. I like the second edit larger dots allow more powder to pass through the screen which will make the powder print more vibrant and saturated smaller dots work well for images you'd like to be lighter. Now you're ready to print your film positive be sure that you have the appropriate type of film positive for your printer. Photoshop is a powerful tool but adjustments to the image can also be made after we have printed the film positive using scissors or an exacto blade, you can cut out unwanted areas or an opaque paint pen can be used to add black areas that were not in the original by storing your film positive in a folder where it will not get scratched or folded. It can be used again and again. The next step is to expose your image onto a coded screen. Refer to our basic print technology lesson to learn more about the exposure and washout procedures. There is a wonderful range of possibilities with screen printing. With these digital techniques under your belt, you're ready to expand the versatility of screen printing in your work. So go big try using different colors of glass, exploit reactive potential, manipulate texture through heat work in the kiln. Most of all revel in the mashup between digital and analog process.