Riso Printing Photos 01
In one of my visits to the RISOGRAD, I looked through materials around and something piqued my interest. Riso printed photos!
I haven’t considered it much before. But here I was, looking at some great stuff. So, I had to try it for myself! Spoiler alert: It worked, but not really.
It just isn’t that simple. It looks simple, but it’s not.
First thing I necessarily got into, is color separation.
Woohoo, heard that before? Color separation, color profiles, yay. Well, I haven’t done much with any of it before, so I had a few things to look up.
First, let’s see what does the chat say about these concepts instead of looking up a proper definition:
A color profile is a standardized set of data that characterizes how colors are represented in different devices, such as cameras, monitors, printers, and presses. It ensures consistent color reproduction across various devices. In printing, the most common color profiles are based on ICC (International Color Consortium) standards.
Color separation is the process of dividing a full-color image into its individual components (usually Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black—CMYK) to prepare it for printing. Each component is printed on a separate plate in traditional printing processes like offset printing.
Right. Riso printing community on the internet is wast, and there are many good sources to reach for, and among those is the many, and more, and lots of free color profiles for riso inks.
Here are links to some of those:
https://en.exploriso.info/exploriso-colour-profiles
https://colorshift.theretherenow.com
After I looked at and read what I could find, I chose a project to execute. This semester we had a photopgrahy course with Martin Osterider, so some photographs needed to be printed. I printed than with FH rtisograph and as such chose to go with black colors and fluo orange accents. I needed appropriate color profile, and the closest I could find was black+bright red. I downloaded it, installed it on my computer, and then went on to apply it to my photographs.
It was not a clean process. Some photos worked better, some worse, depending on the levels of red in them. In some cases, I had to go and tweak the original colors a little before separation. For example turn blue playground toy into a red one, to get it as an accent into my orange separation layer. Photoshop, friends, photoshop.
At other times I did the separation, but only kept it for the accent orange layer, trashed the black layer, and used grayscale original photo as a black layer. It really depends on the specific photo, what worked best for it. And then, the real result I only saw once it was printed. Some pictures were not good for this method at all. Some turn out quite well.
Here are some videos on other color separation methods:
