Chromolithograph simulation

Good afternoon, all —

I’m trying to recreate the effect of 19thC French/Belgian chromolithographs, with separate colour layers (= the separate litho stones). Is there a way that Acorn can look at an image, say that there’s X amount of a defined colour (ideally a colour range, but…), and select just that colour into a layer that I could then blend with other colour/layers? I’ve been banging my head against this for weeks, and can’t come up with the right selection/order of filters to make it work…

when you learn how, teach me how to make a filter to make a filter: gouache

/ɡwäSH/

You could probably use the Curves filter.

Let’s say you only wanted red to come through, then you could select the green channel from the curves and dial it all down to zero, and then do the same with blue. What you have left is nothing but red.

Let me know if that does or doesn’t work!

Thanks, will give it a try. For the time being, I’m just pasting in the colour layers by way of flooding outlined areas, but I’ll also want to try using defined colours. I wonder whether there are ways of using non-primary (RGB or CMYK) colour definitions as filters (as using a brown ink in a chromo, or a [caucasian] flesh tone)….

Call me dense — ‘You’re dense!’, there, did it for you — but when I did this, I couldn’t get the layers to blend in a way that produced a similitude of the original image. Now, I am sure I don’t understand all the blend options correctly, and I am not sure how to assign opacity to this operation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but so far this is leading me to a blind alley. Will keep banging my head on it.

If you set the blend mode of the layers to “Difference”, they will blend back together like the original.