Color halftoning methods for screen printing and special effect pigments : Reproducing iridescent colors

Sammanfattning: Iridescence is the property that makes colors vary by angle of observation. Technology has made it possible to print with ink that has this anisotropic property. The ink that is used contains microparticles and therefore only specific printing methods can be used, for example screen printing. This comes with new demands on halftones, due to its procedure; dots cannot be too small, and keeping structures should be prioritized. To minimize costs and time, prints should be simulated before sending an order. In this thesis, different methods to halftone for screen printing with iridescent ink are developed. Three existing methods are compared to methods that are developed for this specific cause. The result is presented as a 2D-mask and as an interactive 3D-simulation, using data measured from real ink. Also, properties of iridescence are analyzed to separate it from diffuse colors. An OpenGL simulation tool was developed for simulating halftones on 3D-models. The ink reflectance spectra are represented by polynomials that take as input the wavelength and observation angle. Given an observation angle, a spectrum can be found, which can be converted to RGB and set as the output color in the fragment shader. The program uses an RGB-mask which is the combined masks of the halftone. This is loaded as a texture which indicates what polynomial to use. There is no perfect method that works for all types of images. Images that contain colors similar to the inks benefit from morphological halftoning (enhanced structures) for iridescent areas, or foreground, and hatching (an angle dependant grid pattern) for diffuse areas, or background. Other images, that contain mixed colors as cyan, yellow or magenta, benefit froma hue separation error diffusion, where masks are created by thresholding the hue where the mixed colors are error diffused.The actual prints confirmed the hypothesis that tone reproduction can be of lower priority while structure and depth preservance should be highly prioritized. Iridescent colors can be separated from diffuse colors by thresholding the saturation combined with value, or the lightness of the Lab-representation