ISIS Relaunches Icefields Halftoning Software

This was a much heralded product a few years back (2000). Purported to be a vastly superior half-toning method. The developer (Stephen Herron) has just released an update and is apparently working at producing a new version 5. Requires a Mac. Opinions? Did anyone have a chance to use this in the field (pun intended)? I'd like to hear about it.

http://www.isisimaging.com/ICEFIELDS.html
~m

What exactly is going on when printing via an Epson printer with the driver supplied by Epson? Does this use stochoastic printing?

I remember in Dan Burkholder's book there was a Photoshop workflow to change your image to a bitmap using Diffued dithering or some other method to get a screen? I was printing to a imagesetter at the time.

Now with a desktop printer doesnt the Epson driver take care of all of this?

With either printing B&W or Color do stochastic screening come into play?

I think the trick to using an inkjet to make the mechanical for photogravure is to try to exploit its ability to make a binary image. I don't know if it is possible to do this right out of the box or if you need to jump through a lot of hoops. I sent an e-mail to Stephen Herron and he says the big advantage over using Photoshop's dither pattern is that Icefields makes a unique pattern for each of the CMYK channel's when it's outputting where photoshop uses the same dither pattern. Icefields also is much better in the highlights apparently.
~m

Icefields

mkochsch said:

This was a much heralded product a few years back (2000). Purported to be a vastly superior half-toning method. The developer (Stephen Herron) has just released an update and is apparently working at producing a new version 5. Requires a Mac. Opinions? Did anyone have a chance to use this in the field (pun intended)? I'd like to hear about it.

http://www.isisimaging.com/ICEFIELDS.html
~m

Click to expand...

Icefields works great..... It takes a few extra steps but the results are great.
For screen printing it has a low res algorithym that is incredible. and the hi res with a 4color process just looks like a photo. it eliminated any for of morie. The only trick is testing different resolutions for the right print environment since the files are not scaleable. You need to convert grayscales to bitmaps that work correctly with different image setter resolutions. For example low res screen print 120dpi hi res screen print 280dpi hi res offset at 2540 on a lino 550 837dpi etc.... for 150 its worth it back in 96 I payed 800 for it.