'arftone? Not arf!

Texturelabs (the youtube channel/website that started this) is an amazing resource.

I didn't have to do color seps often when I worked in prepress, but every single fucker that I did is seared in my memory.

@dogwelder yeah, it's a photoshop thing, so not my jam.

@ardgedee managed to avoid it completely, I'm glad to say. Every prepress place I worked had a separation guy. They did great work, but every last one of them was mad as a box of frogs

TIL: Ghostcript is still a thing

@scruss We were using digital imagesetters (that weird historical interlude between photo-typesetting and desktop publishing, so we were still building pages by hand using x-acto knives and hot wax) that would output color photos from the wire services in CMYK separations for us. Usually all we had to do was put a knockout in the negative where the color photo would go and attach the seps, and the press crew burned the plates. I was never clear on exactly how they did those to get them aligned -- I had to stay in prepress handling late editions while they were doing setup and early runs, otherwise I could've asked to watch.

Advertisements were purely the domain of prepress though -- we were property of the ad department, not editorial -- so on the rare day we had a color ad to run, we had to do the separations by hand. Acetate is so slippery when you need accuracy in micrometers.

@danelectro it does sterling backend work in OS X printing system as well as CUPS on Linux. It may also be the PDF backend in That Brother Printer That Everyone Buys

@ardgedee I was purely CTP, and in slow-moving reference publishing. We'd occasionally get imagesetter bromide output for proofs, but it was rare

@scruss even if the tutorials won't work for you, the site is full of good quality textures, all free. It's worth a look: https://texturelabs.org/

I did support and QA for TrapWise (digital trapping software for color separations) and PressWise (digital imposition software) once upon a time...

@danelectro I can imagine Jobs personally demanding Ghostscript in OSX just to flip off Adobe.

Vaguely recall a news article (or at least trade gossip) around the time Apple and NeXT merged to the effect that Adobe was making more in profit than NeXT from NeXT OS licenses.

@ardgedee i approve of that sort of pettiness

especially because my last intentional use of ghostcript was creating postscript versions of windows specific email attachments to reply back with

@ardgedee tbh, I think it's part of CUPS. OS X uses the remains of NeXT's DisplayPostscript environment, rejigged to render in their own toolkit

@scruss I don't think OSX has any DPS in it, it uses Quartz which Apple built in-house. The Quartz API might be derived from DPS's to make the transition easier though.