Riso Printing Photos 02
I had another opportunity to do some risoprinting, when I joined Lucia for her workshop she holds with her students every year. Because this wasn’t one of my private printing sessions, I didn’t have time to tweak and adjust on spot depending on results, so I went with whatever I prepared and observed the problems that arose.
I selected 3 of my old photos, of which I thought they might look cool risoprinted with the blue and pink riso inks at FH, and one illustration in 2 colors, of which I don’t have layers separated, so I applied color separation method to it too.
The photos are rather monochromatic, so I expected trouble when color separation. I also struggled to find a good profile to apply here. Just as previously when I needed black+fluo orange profile, and there was none, there was none for medium blue+fluo pink. I substituted it with teal+fluo pink one.
It still required much color tweaking and in the end I think the prints would be best just monochromatic, but this was color separation experiment, and things have been learned from it. Specifically, things about our FH risograph. I had my suspicions before from previous project printed there I wrote about in another blog post, and this session confirmed my suspicions.
The little risograph we have hardly differentiates between 100% to about 80% opacity. The photos, while clearly with a variety of grayscale levels, came too dark.
Lucia, however, does something I didn’t really try much before, and perhaps it would be interesting to see, it it works the same. Why I mostly print straight from computer, she utilizes the risograph scanner. Next time I will test this.
Back to the prints and colors. One photograph turned out great. One okay-ish. One terrible. The illustation is boring. The one good photograph I have also tried in black and fluo pink, because it seemed to me it might be a nice fit for it.
The preparation of layers was even less clean process than my previous photo printing, because of previously mentioned monochromatic nature of the pictures.
