Converting full color to 6 pantone color/layer file?

Artist Central
1

I feel like many of the tutorials I’ve found are more for images without gradients or shading. If I have an image with these kinds of color shifts, do I have to go back to the drawing board? Other tutorials I’ve found are more regarding the start of a new image, and not the conversion of another full color image. Am I better off just recoloring using flat colors? The only thing is that I feel like the shading helps my design look more authentic (a riff on the old 2D Mario promotional artwork), so I’d really like to preserve that if possible.

2

There are several threads around here that address gradients and halftone creation. You might have to do a little of both: conversion of what you have and recreating some of the areas with gradients. I do not spend much time in the creative arena, but plenty of other people here do. Perhaps some of them can link to some of those threads?
Bueler?
Bueler?
Bueler?

3

I know of two:

4

Thanks! A combination of those tutorials plus advice from a friend helped a lot. I just wish there was a magical button to convert my picture over! I have to do some reworking on it.

5

Yeah, after thinking about your post overnight, and reading the title again, the only way to print ‘full color’ art is what we call ‘Simulated Process’, which we do on occasion, BUT NOT FOR DERBY SUBMISSIONS. Simulated Process is done by using a plug-in for Phostoshop(sort-of). The program basically looks at every pixel and makes a decision as to what color it is going to print, and then assigns it to a channel. Pretty involved, but some of the results are pretty cool! You might contact the art directors about us producing some of your art sometime.

6

Thanks again everyone. Basically the rules of thumb I’ve found (with all your help of course!)are these:

1.) Shirt.Woot doesn’t take kindly to printing dots that are 1-2 pixels big because it can cause problems with shrinking to smaller size shirts.
2.) When converting to halftone in Photoshop, a frequency of something like 30 is recommended by shirt.woot.
3.)Using Color Overlays after creating a halftone can help because you’re not dealing with color in your ‘halftone creation’ file.
4.) Using unique angles can help avoid interference.
5.) A halftone can go on top of another color, but another halftone can’t go on top of THAT halftone - or does that matter?
6.) If you’re crafty, you could have two halftones overlap with the t-shirt color showing through.

Hope I’m not forgetting everything. This is quite a learning process?

EDIT: One more question if you don’t mind indulging me!

If I’m avoiding halftone dots that are too small - should I ACTIVELY clean these dots up when making the design for my submission? Or can I go “I’ll just have to know that these dots won’t survive the reduction process” and just know that they’ll disappear? In other words, should I clean them up, or just make sure that tiny dots aren’t integral to the colors in the image?